Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [64]
The GI truck drivers from the supply convoy sitting alongside the road stood on their running boards, hanging onto open doors, looking stone faced at the passing tankers out of admiration and pity. The tankers flashed smiles and upturned thumbs, which the truckers returned.
The misty rain clouds provided a ceiling of only a hundred feet, too low for aircraft to land. Forster's tanks took a shortcut on the Katum airstrip, rattling down the PSP matting as Major Weeks waved them on. Captain Kaldi of Charlie Company finally radioed them to stop until his APCs caught up. Highway 4 continued north from Katum, an unused elevated road carpeted with dry yellow grass and pockmarked with an occasional crater. Moving on, Forster felt like he was driving through a tunnel: Leaden clouds hung low, and the ground fog clung to the scrubby flatlands, reducing visibility to two hundred meters.
By the time the sun began burning through the haze, tanks and tracks had followed the highway for a mile as it angled northwest. A C&C Loach thumped over and instructed Kaldi to have Forster's point platoon jump off the road to the right and head northeast toward the border. Rolling cross-country into flat bottomlands, Forster dismounted his tank and made his way across a chasm five feet deep and fifteen feet across, last night's rainwater standing at the bottom, guiding his tank driver through where it looked the easiest. No sweat. The APCs of Charlie Company followed, slowly easing themselves to the bottom, then goosing the powerpack up the opposite embankment, until tanks and tracks were spread out in a column of twos as they proceeded across a paddy.
According to Forster's funny papers, or map, they were now in Cambodia. They were greeted not by the expected torrent of enemy fire but by a four-foot-long snake that slithered past the front of their tank. Forster's driver, Jim Harvey of Chicago, stood up in his driver's hatch to make sure he got the snake with his treads.
The flatlands rolled on into a gradual valley, and a lonely little wooden structure was noticed on the low red ridge to their left. It was the first structure they had seen in Cambodia, and Captain Kaldi, taking no chances, told Forster to plaster it. The pair of Pattons pivoted with a platoon of APCs and, now facing the shed, proceeded to recon by fire with their .50-caliber machine guns for ten minutes. The only response they got was a water buffalo that came around from behind the shed, and it was soon hit in the leg by a fifty slug. Limping, the buff went down under the next bursts.
The infantrymen dismounted from their tracks and walked up the hill, but all they found was the one dead water buffalo, so back down they came. With the tanks leading, they proceeded a half mile farther into scraggly green vegetation that stood only ten to twenty inches high. Thirty feet into the field, the nose of Forster's tank suddenly began to sink, and Ted, the tank commander, told Harvey, the driver, to stop. Their sister tank just entering the field was able to throw it into reverse. Forster's tank, meanwhile, sank up to the hull before the crew realized that the green brush was really the tops of pineapple plants under irrigation. The field was sopping wet