Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [73]
The other crewman, still hanging in his chute from a tree, was in similar condition, although Lieutenant Colonel Brookshire did not know this as he followed a platoon from his H Company toward the crash site. Sitting on the back of his ACAV as the tanks ahead smashed a path through the dense bamboo thickets, Brookshire felt like he was in a solar furnace. He finally had to climb down inside his track and swallow salt tablets with two full canteens of water.
The other two platoons of H Company, meanwhile, advanced on the NVA bunkers, whose detection had precipitated the midair collision to begin with. As they maneuvered between the trees, Sergeant Hackbarth, one of the tank commanders, saw a four-foot-tall anthill before them with bamboo sprouting from it. He didn't think he had to tell Edwards, his cocky but good driver, to avoid it, but the nose of the tank rose up against the hill and–boom–when they slammed back down on the opposite side, the huge tank just stopped moving. A strip of the tough green bamboo had wrapped so tightly around the final drive–the mechanical device that imparts force to the track–that it snapped a metal shaft four inches in diameter. Hackbarth and his crew of Conkright, Langston, and Edwards stood on their crippled tank as the rest of the company roared past to continue the attack, leaving behind two ACAVs and an M88 armored recovery vehicle to secure the Patton. Hackbarth, who usually took things too seriously, didn't appreciate the good-natured ribbing from the others about getting stuck, especially as the sun went down and everyone realized how alone they really were. The crews of the four vehicles all stayed up on guard, each man getting only about two hours of sleep in snatches. Every hour their platoon leader requested a sitrep and Hackbarth, not wanting to even whisper for fear it would give away their position, would simply break squelch by squeezing the bar on the radio handset, indicating that they were still okay. The company had artillery ready to support them, but the morning's light came without incident. A new part was helicoptered in, and after a few hours of work, Hackbarth and his crew set off to rejoin their company. Their nerve-wracking experience was not unique for vehicles that stalled in the middle of this where-are-we-now country, so that Captain Speedy of K Troop could comment with classic understatement: “Since broken vehicles were subject to being left alone for periods of time, motivation to maintain a smooth-running vehicle was high.”
While Lieutenant Colonel Brookshire's 2d Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry, smashed its way northward like a swarm of metal locusts, barely pausing to count coup, Lieutenant Colonel Griffin's 3d Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry, followed in their wake in a more deliberate, methodical manner. So it was on Day Three, while moving through the sun-dappled underbrush of a light forest, that Captain Wallace's M Company took a burst of AK47 fire from a lone NVA who was then seen running toward a bunker. Several men climbed from their tanks with their M 16s, led by Lee Van Day, their communist-turned-allied scout, through the vegetation. When Day's shouts into the bunker did not result in the NVA emerging with raised hands, they fired and tossed several grenades into the aperture. For good measure, they then flattened the bunker with a tank. It appeared that the bunker was part of a series of listening posts around a weapons cache, and that the lone NVA had been a caretaker left behind to distract the invaders from that cache. When they followed a communications wire by hand deeper into the brush, M Company found itself to be the new owners of a two-hundred-cubic-foot area of NVA rockets, mines, and mortar rounds. They would not have found the cache