Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [75]
The motorcycle was spilled beside the highway, gas tank smoldering from where tracers had punctured it. The two riders were sprawled dead in the low green grass of the highway's shoulder.
Several mech infantrymen jumped from an APC to inspect the bodies, and commented that they were probably a pair of lieutenants. Tucked under their belts were 9mm pistols wrapped in plastic to protect them from moisture, and in their wallets were photographs of them in their dress greens with their wives and children. Forster took no satisfaction in their deaths after seeing those photographs, but he also succumbed to no guilt when postage stamps were also found in the wallets with illustrations of American jets being shot down and American tanks being blown up.
Them or us. That simple.
In fifteen minutes or so, the equipment from the dead NVA had been gathered for the battalion intelligence officer. With the motorcycle ablaze behind them, tires and all, the group began rolling back down the highway toward the laager. Where the bullet-riddled Volkswagen lay, at least two smokes had been popped, and the brightly colored fog completely enveloped that part of the highway. As each tank or track drove through the smoke, they saw the eight journalists and cameramen who stood on Captain Tieman's track on the other side, filming their surrealistic emergence.
The NVA mortared them again before dawn the next morning, as they had been doing every morning without result, so that the troops began to refer to the brief shellings as reveille.
* * *
When unknown persons were spotted, the general rule was to advance and hold fire unless fired upon, because while they might be from the North Vietnamese Army, Viet Cong, or Khmer Rouge, they might also be Cambodian peasants who had been given weapons and pressed into service by the communists or, worse, Cambodian villagers or refugees. It was this rule that saved the lives of the Cambodian riders of a bicycle supply column laden with NVA rice, captured by Captain Speedy and K Troop of the 11th Cavalry. The rice they destroyed; the Cambodians they let go because, as Speedy thought, what could you do to these civilians and their bicycles that were their livelihood?
Chapter 14: THUNDER RUN
In the late afternoon of 3 May 1970, Brigadier General Shoemaker, ADC of the 1st Cavalry Division, landed his C&C Huey in a jungle laager to give Lieutenant Colonel Brookshire, CO of the 2d Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, his new orders, to which Brookshire replied, “Where the heck is Snoul?”
Snoul was a rubber plantation town more than forty kilometers north of 2-11 ACR's present position, and they were to attack toward it immediately. Brookshire, who until the briefing with Shoemaker thought they were conducting a limited raid, did not have maps that reached Snoul, so Shoemaker filled him in. Snoul sat at the junction of Cambodian Route 7, which ran into town from Memot to its southwest, and RVN Highway 13, which ran into town to its southeast; the two macadam highways met in Snoul, where Route 7 ended and from where Highway 13 continued due north. Material that had been trucked and bicycled down the Ho Chi Minh Trail had then been transported to staging areas along the Cambodian border via these two roads. If the NVA attempted to back-haul these supplies beyond the self-imposed range of the U.S. units, their supply columns would most likely pass through the Snoul crossroads, so 2-11 ACR and 3-11 ACR, which would follow them in, were to cut the roads around the plantation town, then see what there was to be found.
Shoemaker told Brookshire to capture the sod airstrip on the southern outskirts of Snoul so supplies could be flown in, but