Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [66]
His heart suddenly stopped at the sight of armored vehicles parked among the trees ahead.
He feared they might be the NVA armor thought lurking in the area, but it was actually Lieutenant Nerdahl's platoon from B Company, 2d Battalion (Mechanized), 47th Infantry, and Flowers had his tank pull up fender to fender with the command tank. He hopped over, map in hand, to ask what was going on, and Nerdahl, big, solid, freckled–a friend from West Point–answered that he was just as confused. They compared maps. The terrain was all flat jungle with pockets of craters and clearings, but no terrain features to guide on. It was all very confusing, and Nerdahl's platoon didn't fit into what Flowers knew of the plan, so he radioed battalion. The leaders of Task Force B didn't seem to have a clear picture either, but the summation of their response made sense: You two must be lost, so now you can be lost together.
Because of the thick woods, the manuever had, in fact, broken down into individual platoons struggling forward in isolation. In addition, the battalion's tanks, long used in brutal terrain and long in need of overhauls, were throwing tracks on the rutty forest floor or otherwise clunking to a stop amid the trees. The whole affair was getting bogged down in some areas and strung out in others. Although most of the NVA were retreating before them, others were going underground: Tunnels and bunker complexes honeycombed the area, and the NVA could be bypassed unseen.
Flowers and Nerdahl began moving forward together. Crashing through more trees, Flowers suddenly noticed a spiderhole down amid the tangle by his tank treads, then another spiderhole and another, and poles in the ground and NVA uniforms hanging from clotheslines. The hair on the back of his neck stood up. Tank turrets traversed and 90mm gun tubes pointed through the trees as the mech infantrymen clambered off their APCs and very cautiously began to nose around in the bunkers and thatch hootches. The NVA had apparently just departed: The GIs found wet rice in bowls.
* * *
Second Lieutenant Ivo F. Peske of the 3d Platoon, A Company, 2d Battalion (Mechanized), 47th Infantry, who was described by one of his company commanders as head and shoulders above the other platoon leaders, was never able to numb himself enough to accept what their ultimate objective was: to kill people. He was a sensitive man who simply could not stomach the naked brutality of the infantry. He despised the job he'd been given, but he did his best mostly because of the ulcerous fear that if he did not, the kids he'd been put in charge of would pay for it. He took no pride in the Bronze Stars the Army gave him for a job well done, because he saw no glory in what they did:
I only dealt with battalion on the radio, and it was always go-get-them-dicks or get-me-some-bodies-today. Everything was body count, body count, body count. You had to produce bodies so they wouldn't punish you by putting you in a bad area. Too many times we killed for no reason, just to kill. It became easy. It was like eating. No big deal. A dead person was not a human anymore. It was just a piece of meat that ended up smelling. That really turned me off. It's very easy to kill. It doesn't take much. It's very