Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [54]
Kingston, who was not nicknamed Barbed Wire Bob for nothing, answered bluntly, “Well, you don't get your first objective and you and I will have a one-way conversation.”
Flying out of Brigade, Weeks commented to Claybrook, “Sir, we gotta get off this damn chopper. I got to work on this op order.” Claybrook dropped off Weeks and one of his operations sergeants in the clearing where the 3d Brigade forward command post was in the process of going up. Combat engineers were scraping up the perimeter berm with bulldozers, and Chinooks lowered conexes into dugouts where they were layered with sandbags to serve as command posts and medical bunkers. Major Weeks and Sergeant Ivy knelt in the upturned earth at the fringes of the construction with clipboards and yellow writing paper. They had just about finished when a Chinook dragging a slingload of artillery shells came to a hover over their heads, and the sudden tornado sent the op order up into the trees surrounding the perimeter. Weeks and Ivy went tree climbing, then called for another helicoper to return them to battalion near Katum.
A half mile short of the airstrip at Katum, Kaldi's company and Forster's platoon pulled off the road into an old, abandoned position, stripped of barbed wire but with bunkers still intact. The other companies of the two battalions laid claim to various fields of scrub brush and elephant grass, and as the sun sank RPG screens went up.
Fifty supply trucks sat in a long line to one side of the road, their GI drivers dozing in the cabs. Caribou after Caribou rattled in on the PSP strip before sunset, Chinooks set down slingloads of supplies, and other helicopters landed in an unoccupied field to disgorge soldiers with 1st Cav patches.
It was pitch-black that night, and a loud downpour–the first heavy rain of the season–swamped the foxholes. Lieutenant Colonel Claybrook and Major Weeks gathered their company commanders under the poncho liner awning stretched from the operations track and, with the rain drum-rolling above their heads and light coming from the lowered back ramp, told them in terse terms that they would be leading the push into Cambodia at first light.
Their mech battalion, organized as Task Force A (Claybrook), would push north on the extreme left flank of the operation with five combat elements: HHC/2-47 (Gallagher), A/2-47 (Muehlstedt) with l/A/2-34 (Kocopi), C/2-47 (Kaldi) with 3/A/2-34 (Forster), A/2-34 (-) (Tieman), and B/2-4 FA (Hughes).
The armor battalion, organized as Task Force B (Redmond),3 would go in on their right flank with only three combat elements, including a headquarters company doing double duty as mech infantry with their scout platoon, mortar platoon, and tank detachment: HHC/2-34 (Green-road), B/2-34 (Santiago),4 and B/2-47 (Landreth).
Afterward, things finally caught up with Weeks, and he ended up squatting over a cathole he'd shoveled out of the mud, shaking and shitting. They had been told they might run into NVA armor.
The sound of that had a nice ring to it, though, for the glory seekers. One of them, Pfc Harold Spurgeon of the Scout Platoon, HHC/2-47 Mech, was inside his APC as the rain came down. The five GIs of his crew sat cramped among the ammunition cans, ration boxes, water containers, and assorted odds and ends. Although they had the hatches closed, rainwater streamed through. Spurgeon pulled a blanket around his shoulders. It was soon soaked. In the red glow of the interior lights, his buddies were mixing up a C-ration meal. He was cold and hungry, but it smelled too bad to eat.
A GI in a rain-slick poncho showed up: “Hey, guys, the LT wants a meeting over here by the track.”
Spurgeon was the only one off his APC interested enough to slog over. About ten grunts stood around the lieutenant, who had his hands in his pockets. He sounded bored: “Well, in case you haven't figured it out by now, we're going into Cambodia.”
Spurgeon, with bushy black hair and Japanese blood, had enlisted to fight and liked to picture himself a stone-cold, obsidian-eyed mercenary. Problem was