Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [62]
The driver stopped and dropped down in his hole, and Cambria flung a hand grenade into the trees. It didn't explode, and he realized he hadn't pulled the pin. His right arm was beginning to throb painfully by then, and working awkwardly with his left arm he grabbed a second grenade and tried to pull the pin out with his teeth. It didn't budge, and now his teeth ached too. He finally looped the pin over the sight of his .50-cal and jerked it out. He threw all his fragmentation grenades, then found a few smoke grenades and threw them too. Through ears beginning to uncloud, he realized that the NVA had ceased fire on his vehicle.
Cambria picked his .45 back up and managed to fumble another magazine into the pistol handle. Needing to get to a track with working radios, he tore off his CVC helmet, and climbed down from his ACAV, and started walking to his left. As his mind began to slow down, he felt as if he were lumbering in slow motion. The smell of his own blood hit him. He was on the verge of vomiting. He heard the snap of rounds passing overhead. The GIs aboard the ACAV he was stumbling toward shouted and waved at him to hurry, and he finally fell against the side of their track. Two men reached down to haul him aboard. Cambria looked at them: They were covered with his blood, and only then did he realize how badly he was hit. In addition to his mangled arm and shoulder and back, he was splattered across the back with three dozen small pieces of shrapnel, and a chip of his medic's shattered skull was lodged–permanently–in the back of his neck.
Cambria took the radio handset and called each TC for a casualty report. Two of his seven track commanders did not answer. Fearing two whole crews were casualties, he switched to the troop net and in one breath screamed for reinforcements, gunships, and two medevacs. Through the pain fogging his mind, Cambria could barely hear Menzel's response, “I'll be right there. Stay where you are.”
Captain Menzel was coming up from behind so quickly that the last detonation of claymore mines from the wood line had sent shrapnel snapping past his head and the head of his TC, who had been laying down short bursts with his .50-cal as they had quickly maneuvered forward past H Company.
Menzel, hunched behind his TC, could now see Cambria unconscious on the ACAV deck, and he shouted into his radio mike to fan out Crupper's platoon. They came forward at a thunderous roll, firing between the slender trees and between the widely spaced tracks of Cambria's platoon. The only way to break an ambush was to overwhelm it with firepower. Menzel, enthused as always as they closed in on the kill, was also thoroughly pissed: If only he had allowed Cambria to open fire immediately, the NVA rocket-propelled grenade gunners may have been shredded before they could have even gotten off their first volley. Chaos would have been a charitable description of what had come next. With Cambria down, Menzel was afraid that the already-battered platoon would stall and panic, but the voice of Sergeant First Class Brown popped up in turn on the radio. He was now in command.
Johnny on the spot, Menzel thought, and, in fact, the ambushed pla-toon's firing never slacked off. The continuous roar had left vines cut and hanging free, and the brush so gutted that Menzel could see part of the network of zigzagging slit trenches under the trees. He could even make out two or three charred corpses. Bamboo was smashed and tree trunks were denuded of bark. Menzel added to the cacophony as he stood atop his ACAV emptying his AK, then reloading and pumping another thirty rounds into the trenches. He slipped his third and last banana clip from his fatigue pocket and locked and loaded before dropping his CVC onto the deck and running bareheaded toward the disabled Sheridan. The driver was still in a state of shock, and Menzel grabbed him, slapped him, screamed in his face, “Get this goddamned vehicle moving and shooting! Don't worry about him, there's