Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [7]
Cambria slipped on his CVC radio helmet and hollered at his Sheridan crew to hurry up and fire. They had already depressed the 152mm main gun down the highway and had laid a cannister round–containing 9,800 razor-sharp fléchettes–in the breech, but the gunner shouted back that the electronics system that controlled the cannon had again malfunctioned. They couldn't get the green light that signaled the cannon was ready to fire.
The NVA disappeared under the flarelight.
The malfunction corrected, the Sheridan finally boomed out its cannister round–the tremendous recoil raising up the front of the tank past its first two road wheels. The round splintered the sapling trees where the NVA were now returning fire with AK47 automatic weapons. Green tracers from the AKs snapped across the laager, and red tracers from the Sheridans and ACAVs streamed back in the dark. The crew of the mortar track expended two-thirds of their eighty-round load around the intersection of the highway and the creek, and the Sheridans fired cannister and high-explosive rounds for some thirty minutes of noise, confusion, and lights ricocheting in the dark. Then the NVA fire began to evaporate. To cover the withdrawal of the main body, other NVA toting B40 rocket-propelled grenade launchers moved through the black jungle facing the laager, firing an RPG. An AK47 burst from one spot, then from another, drawing a torrent of return fire each time. Finally, sometime before dawn, the firing ceased altogether.
At daybreak, a medical evacuation helicopter, a Huey, landed near the laager, its propellors pushing away the morning mist and the colored smoke of the smoke grenade used to mark the landing zone. The medevac departed with a soldier who'd been shot in the foot, the platoon's only casualty.
As the morning mist burned off, two lines of bulging NVA rucksacks were revealed along both shoulders of the dirt highway, as were eight NVA bodies that lay crumpled in the roadside brush. The Loach and Cobra of a Pink Team1 from the 11th ACR Air Cavalry Troop had gone airborne along the nearby blueline and spotted an NVA carrying a wounded comrade along the streambed. Two more NVA died, and a Chinook transport helicopter landed to evacuate what had been found in and around the twenty-nine abandoned backpacks: two AK47 rifles and two RPG launchers, sixty pounds of tinned fish, and seven hundred pounds of rice and thirty pounds of grain.
Several Chinese pistols found among the equipment were kept by the grunts as souvenirs, but the letters and diaries found in the packs were evacuated to the desks of the regiment's interpreters and intelligence officers, while the men of G Troop prepared for another day of pushing bush.
* * *
When the 2d Squadron of the Blackhorse Regiment had originally entered this part of War Zone C in February 1970, it became quickly apparent that their new area of operations was nothing less than a hornet's nest. Battle Six, the squadron commander, already knew what had happened to the 3d Squadron, the sister element they had just relieved, in War Zone C back on Thanksgiving Day 1969. They had laagered, unawares, only a hundred meters from a major NVA infiltration trail hidden under the trees and paved with bamboo, and a North Vietnamese Army RPG team passing by in the night had hit and run. One of the RPG shaped charges had penetrated a tracked ammunition carrier and had detonated the artillery shells inside. So on their first night in War Zone C, the 2d Squadron had an uneasy feeling as they laagered in near the blackened hulks of the 3d Squadron's old positions. Three months' worth of vines had twirled around the two self-propelled howitzers, whose gun tubes had been blown right off their tank chassis, as well as