Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [74]
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On the morning of 3 May 1970, the highway below the laager of 2-47 Mech, and their attached company from 2-34 Armor, was dotted with refugees from the workers' villages in the rubber plantations. There were individual families going by with nothing but bowls of rice hung in colored cloth, and whole hamlets that straggled past with oxcarts piled with their belongings. Coming from both directions, they had no idea where they were running to. The battalion intelligence section and their scouts set up shop in the laager under a colorful beach umbrella and on top of a large straw mat, but the scouts were Vietnamese who did not speak Cambodian. A call had gone out for troopers with high-school French, but the language barrier wasn't cracked. The refugees weren't talking anyway. They were scared and just wanted to be on their way. Chinooks began arriving every two hours to drop off slingloads of ammunition–blowing down the troops' bamboo-and-poncho-liner sun shelters in the process–or to take out the refugees to the temporary camps springing up on the other side of the border, or both.
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An old blind man was coming down the highway on a young man's back when Lieutenant Peske of the 2d of the 47th Panthers had his men stop the pair. Peske's and another platoon were outposted along the highway, searching the refugees for enemy infiltrators. After routinely checking the blind man and the young man who said he was his son, the GIs passed a canteen between them and opened some C rations for them. Peske felt nothing but sorrow for these people. So did his grunts. But a hundred feet down the highway where the other platoon was set up, a young GI casually swung up his M16 and gunned down the old man and the boy, then began laughing with a buddy. Peske couldn't believe his eyes, and had to fight down the urge to kill those two thugs to prove that Americans were really not that type of people!
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The laager of 2-47 Mech and A/2-34 Armor astride Route 7 was high enough to pick up AFVN radio again, which had been inaudible in the Katum lowlands. One of Lieutenant Forster's men, Hart, said that he had heard on the news about other units that had also crossed the border. That was a relief, because the platoon had previously been under the impression that they were on some type of battalion raid and had been emotionally braced for everything from enemy tanks to human wave attacks. Only Forster's tank commander, Ted, still had a gripe, and it wasn't much of one. He had recently extended his combat tour for six months, with his reward, a month's leave, scheduled to begin on the same day as the incursion. Hoping to see some action in Cambodia, Ted had not taken his leave. However, after the dash to Route 7, Cambodia was proving to be more of the same. Ted finally climbed aboard one of the resupply ships that were arriving to beef up their roadside perimeter. When Ted returned after Cambodia, he told the guys in the platoon that he'd seen them on the television news.
There were some events out of the ordinary. Midafternoon one day, a dismounted observation post (OP) a mile down the highway reported a motorcycle was approaching their position. The OP radioed again that the motorcycle had passed them, heading toward the laager, and that its two riders wore NVA fatigues. By then, those in the laager could hear the engine, and tank and track engines began roaring themselves as they rushed toward the highway. Forster, now riding in the cupola to replace Ted, could see the shine of