Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [81]
It was 0300, 5 May 1970.
When the first enemy mortar round landed, Lieutenant Peske had been sitting atop his track, talking with a GI from Texas. It turned out that they had come incountry on the same day, and the kid talked about his parents and their farm. Something suddenly flashed loudly in front of them, and Peske was thrown backward onto the track deck. The kid from Texas had a piece of shrapnel sticking from one eye. He made no sound. Peske screamed for a medic. One ran up, but when Peske began helping the wounded man off the APC, a big hunk of shrapnel walloped into his back, bouncing off and leaving a big red welt; he went over the edge, the wounded man and medic flattened beneath him. The wind knocked out of him, Peske climbed back up to get to his radio. No one at the company headquarters answered. Frustrated and angry, Peske clambered into one of the foxholes and picked up the M60 machine gun lying in it.
Green tracers from AK47s and RPDs snapped from the brush that was silhouetted by the illumination rounds popping overhead.
Shrapnel oscillated in wild shrieks to clang against the steel of the tanks and tracks. Men were screaming. Flares were going up. Faces were moving in the elephant grass.
Lieutenant Peske let go with one long burst at the moving shadows, until the machine gun overheated and jammed. He jumped from the hole. Someone had gotten a stretcher, and they rolled the wounded man onto it; then Peske and the medic humped the litter to the middle of the circle where the battalion medics were set up. Peske rushed back to his platoon and spent the night moving from APC to APC, making sure the men were firing. They needed little encouragement.
Almost no one had seen a real live NVA before. With bullets literally scything the brush and canebreak, Major Weeks thought gleefully that all they'd had going for them was their mortar, while their men were being eaten alive as they tried to crawl forward. No contest. Artillery was also employed; then gunplanes began orbiting low with their mini-guns. The noise and color were dazzling, the volume of return fire such that it was hard to tell if the enemy was still shooting. Lieutenant Colonel Claybrook saw GIs who stood mesmerized with the sound and light show. He got on the horn with various company commanders and platoon leaders to get their people under cover, but in the excitement and confusion of the moment they ignored his calls. The rest were firing like crazy. The chance of an ammunition resupply in the dark was slim, and Claybrook had flares sent up to signal a cease-fire to conserve ammunition. No results. Finally, Claybrook had to send some of his headquarters troops from vehicle to vehicle to get the excited infantrymen off their triggers.
By dawn it was over. Seven GIs had been hit, two of them requiring medical evacuation. The skirmish line that Lieutenant Colonel Claybrook and Major Weeks accompanied counted seventeen enemy dead in the clearing. The NVA were small and waxy, frozen in individual deaths. One was slung with several rifles–recovered probably from dead comrades–but when he'd gotten up to run, a slug had blown off the back of his head. Another NVA lay right in front of a tank whose .50-cal turret gunner, a new black staff sergeant, had been firing madly during the night. He now stood behind his tank, describing the action in a high-pitched chatter as he waved his arms around. Flattened elephant grass marked the path of the staff sergeant's kill, showing where he had crawled up with his 57mm recoilless rifle. The NVA had set up the tube weapon but had been shot in the head before he could fire a single round. That was fortunate, because when the GIs walking around the clearing with M 16s in one hand and cameras in the other kneeled behind the recoilless rifle to peer through its sights, they found that the NVA had had the tank dead nuts in his viewer. The GIs had never seen anything like this, and it was with a certain sense of wonderment that souvenirs were taken. Lieutenant Peske watched one grunt turn over