Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [8]
Battle Six did not intend to suffer any such disasters. When he established his TOC on Hill 95–a small, bald knob in the hardwood forest and the only high ground in these flatlands–he christened it Fort Defiance to match his mood. With an attached platoon from the regimental engineer company, a berm was pushed up around the top of the hill; two eight-inch howitzers and four Dusters with 40mm automatic cannons were dispatched from corps artillery to pull berm guard along with the headquarters troop and tank company of the squadron, which retired to the hill each evening to help secure the TOC and the squadron's howitzer battery. Meanwhile, the squadron's three cavalry troops maintained their own separate and ever-roving night laagers in the surrounding jungle.2
Fort Defiance sat just north of Highway 246. Flying above the area in his Command and Control Huey, Battle Six, who possessed a keen intellect in addition to his hell-for-leather cavalry commander's persona, was struck by how War Zone C best resembled a surrealistic painting. The area had been declared a free-fire zone years before, and its villages had ceased to exist when the inhabitants had been evacuated to refugee camps. Hundreds of shell craters, overlapping and filled with rainwater, had flattened sections of the forest, and the double and triple canopy of the remaining jungle had been heavily defoliated and burned away. Leaf-less and lifeless teak trees stood or rested at odd angles amid the vines and bamboo that grew wildly in the sunlight pouring through the new skeletonized canopy. Rusting in the underbrush was the occasional shell of a helicopter or the burned-out hull of a tank. Patrols sometimes came across the moldy pith helmets and sun-bleached bones of long-forgotten enemy soldiers. Where during the hot war there had been lush jungle and enemy regiments ensconced in elaborately constructed and camouflaged base camps, there was now a broken landscape facing the Cambodian Fishhook, across whose border the battered NVA regiments had retired to rebuild their positions. The Ho Chi Minh Trail fed reinforcements and supplies into these base camps, and helicopter pilots flying the border could see four or five miles into the Fishhook–the sanctuary–where the dust trails of enemy supply columns filtered up through the treetops. Units like the Blackhorse Regiment–among those who had originally dislodged the NVA from War Zone C–were restrained by political choke chains from carrying the fight into the enemy's new backyard, and instead had to hunker down among the intertwining footpaths running south from the Fishhook. Supporting fires from corps artillery could not even be employed at certain distances short of the border for fear a stray round might violate the supposed neutrality of Cambodia.
The rules of ground warfare also forbade the Blackhorse, at least theoretically, from returning fire taken from across the border, but frus-trated GIs occasionally had reason to wonder if everyone on their side really played by such silly rules. Sometimes at night they could see strobe-light flashes over the NVA base camps in Cambodia that resembled nothing other than the B52 bomber raids they had seen in South Vietnam.
Clandestine bombings notwithstanding, the Blackhorse's screening operations to interdict NVA infiltration into Tay Ninh Province–the main corridor being, of course, War Zone C–was a grueling and continuous endeavor. It was never ending precisely because the enemy was afforded such privileges as staging camps protected by imaginary lines. The overall result was the dry rot of morale among the men on the ground, including even the lieutenant colonels, majors, and captains, whose view was that the war effort must be decisively redoubled if anything lasting was to be achieved. The lieutenants