Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [92]
The battalion was getting nowhere. Lieutenant Flowers saw the operation as a catalog of mistakes, which continued on 6 May–three days after the ambush–with an APC platoon from B Company of the Panthers. They spread out to cross a parched clearing. An occasional RPG smoked past, but no one was spotted in the dried-out brush and no one was hit until one of the last RPGs glanced off the turret of Flowers's tank. As soon as the fragments hit him in the forehead, Flowers knew he was dead, but a second later he realized that he was okay, because it was really his fingers that were throbbing. He had fallen or jumped down into his turret, and with his right hand had accidentally slammed the .50-cal down on its pivot to smash the fingertips of his left hand bracing the drop. With the column halted in the clearing, Flowers sat on the mech lieutenant's APC until a medevac could get in for him. He was the only casualty.
The Huey dropped him off at the 2-34 CP near Katum. Everyone there was shocked and angry. Before melting away after the medevac had come and gone, the NVA had fired a final RPG into the APC of the platoon leader from 2-47 Mech. The track had been packed with a hundred pounds of C4 and other ordnance, and vehicle and crew disinte-grated in the combined thunderclap of the rocket-propelled grenade and the demolitions.
Eight GIs were killed, two wounded.
The force of the explosion was such that the NVA who'd fired the RPG was found in some nearby bushes, his head blown off.
Stunned, Lieutenant Flowers wandered into the battalion's muddy little aid station. His forehead was just scratched, but it looked like someone had taken a hammer to his fingertips. The medic said that the nails could start regrowing straight up, so he gave each finger a shot of novo-caine and plucked out the bloody nails. He wrapped each finger, then said, “When those shots wear off, you're gonna hurt bad, so why don't you sleep in my hole over there. There's a six-pack in the cooler. Drink all you want.”
Parched and hungry, Flowers opened beers until he passed out in the sandbagged foxhole. The next morning, he was directed aboard a Huey with the new company commander. Bravo Company had secured a perimeter around all that was left of the disintegrated APC–its floorboard. A pair of tanks from Alpha Company had arrived with a team from Graves Registration. The field was sun blasted and foul smelling. The buzzing of flies was incessant. The dismounted crews from the Alpha tanks walked through the grass and, stone faced, picked up scraps of bodies and zipped them into the deflated body bags that had been laid out. Flowers found a hand lying in the dirt. He picked it up and wondered whose it was, and felt weird at how heavy it was. He had sat on the APC an hour before it was hit, and he stood there now thinking numbly: God, I didn't look at those guys' faces hard enough yesterday, and now they don't even have faces.
Lieutenant Flowers had faced combat, and he had confidence and pride in that. Nothing bothered him anymore, but he also lost his ambitious drive. He felt a certain kindred spirit with the serenity of old people, as though he'd gotten an early look at what they knew: It's all temporary.
It's not an unusual emotion among veterans.
The new company commander, a tall, blond captain with a receding hairline, became violently ill at the smell and scene. He couldn't face it, and within two hours of his arrival, he simply climbed aboard the helicopter dispatched for the Graves team and their body bags and left the war.
While Redmond's Task Force