Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [80]
The sergeant climbed back into the AVLB vehicle and came up out of his hatch with the bolt in hand. With that, Menzel swung up aboard his ACAV, which had also nosed its way down, and took a hold behind the cupola mount of his TC. “Take it slow and easy, Tom.” His young track commander, Tom, guided their driver up and over the bridge, which embedded itself solidly into the riverbank under the vehicle's weight. The rest of G Troop began to come across behind them, one vehicle at a time. An elated Menzel told Tom to gun the ACAV up to where the engineers were still working on their dry-span bridge. Facing Starry and Brookshire from across the river, Menzel smiled and waved, and Brookshire's enthused voice came through his CVC headset, “Three-six, this is Six. Continue to march!”
Lieutenant Colonel Smith later commented, “…the bridges had been cleverly blown. They were partially demolished along their longitudinal axes in such a way that pedestrians and bicycles could still use the undestroyed portion in a catwalk-like crossing, whereas the bridge superstructure was completely unusable by four-wheeled vehicles of any sort. In conversing with a local inhabitant through an interpreter, he expressed admiration for the demolition skills of 'the Chinese.'”
On 4 May 1970, unit boundaries were redrawn to place most of War Zone C in the 25th Division AO, thus freeing up the 1st Cav Division. On 5 May 1970, TF Shoemaker was dissolved in lieu of divisional control over the expanding operations in Cambodia. Every infantry battalion was soon airmobiled across the border, which, as one official monograph noted, “… meant little change in the operations of the 1st Cavalry…. Since the division was already concentrating on fast-moving, light operations, leapfrogging from one small hasty fireb?se to the next, the order for the Cambodian campaign simply told it to do more of the same.”
Starry, taking issue with Menzel's claim that he found the crossing, commented. “We were anxious to maintain the momentum of the attack. I took the bridge section and walked along the bank with the vehicles following. After three or four tries we found a place where we thought the bridge would hold. Then I went back and got Brookshire to send Menzel across to test the bridge.”
Chapter 15: NIGHT ATTACK
CHUG!
Major Weeks came instantly awake from his light sleep in the sandbagged shelter dug behind his APC, where with his radios beside his head he'd been catching his sleep in only fifteen-minute snatches anyway. The sound was of an NVA 60mm mortar round exiting its tube from not far away.
“ Incoming! Incoming!”
CHUG! The Mortar Platoon from Headquarters & Headquarters Company, 2d Battalion (Mechanized), 47th Infantry, was already responding with illumination rounds. A and C Companies scrambled into the foxholes dug between their vehicles in the wagon train laager astride Route 7.
BOOM! The first round exploded in the laager.
BOOM! The second round. Men were shouting.
BOOM! A tank commander from A Company, 2d Battalion, 34th Armor, had already traversed his 90mm main gun toward the sound of the NVA mortar in the canebreak, and pulled off the first of many cannister rounds. Streams of tracers erupted from the laager as shadows moved toward them through the elephant