Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [78]
An AK47 suddenly opened fire, and the line of grunts instantly went prone in the brush. The AK fire stopped, and helmets popped back up. The NVA with the AK jumped from a spiderhole and sprinted down a trail. He was followed by M16 fire, but he disappeared into a bunker. Captain Corcoran moved forward with his Kit Carson Scout, but his calls to surrender were met by another burst of AK, so a grenade was tossed into the bunker. Four NVA were found inside, three dead, one wounded but dead before a medevac could arrive.
Charlie Company continued to press on, finding hootches stacked high with machine gun ammunition and automatic rifles.
Captain Corcoran and Charlie Company, finding more than they could handle, were instructed by Lieutenant Colonel Anderson to set up a night defensive position (NDP) inside the NVA base camp until reinforcements arrived the next morning. During the night, Corcoran reported that trucks were moving on unseen trails in the jungle, so close that they could hear the drivers shifting gears. The NVA were trying to clear out, and quick bursts of M16 fire also occasionally cracked the night. One party of five NVA left three of their comrades dead on a trail when they walked into one ambush team, then lost a fourth man farther up the trail; the survivor ran on, finally surrendering when he encountered yet a third ambush position.
With that prisoner leading the 1st of the 5th Cav the next morning, 5 May 1970, the full extent of the base camp was realized. The complex measured three by one-and-a-half kilometers and there were hundreds of structures, including mess halls, storage bunkers, training areas, pens for livestock, and even a rest area complete with a sunken clay swimming pool and lounging chairs fashioned out of bamboo. There were open-walled, thatch-roofed classrooms with chalkboards and wooden benches, and many hootches with trench lines leading to air raid bunkers. The huge base camp was nicknamed The City, and it proved to be a primary supply depot of the 7th NVA Division, with captured documents revealing that it had been in operation for more than two years. The City, the first major cache discovered in Cambodia, was rivaled in the coming weeks by Rock Island East and Shakey's Hill, two even larger caches discovered by 1st Cavalry Division units later inserted farther north.2 Nonetheless, The City was a stunning prize, containing 171 tons of enemy munitions. A selected sampling of equipment captured there included: 1,282 individual weapons, 202 crew-served weapons, 2,200,000 rounds of ammunition, 58,000 pounds of plastic explosives, 22 cases of antipersonnel mines, and 38 tons of rice and corn.
During the next week the excitement of the find was tempered by the sheer muscle power and long, hot work hours required to blow landing zones out of the jungle and carry the ammo crates to choppers for airlifting out. Engineers carved a road from The City to III CTZ, but, even so, by the middle of May when the 1st of the 5th was scheduled to be combat assaulted even farther north in Cambodia, forty tons of NVA material were still on the ground.