CUE: Run through the Jungle, CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL
The inky blackness of the night seemed to envelop us as the company snaked out onto the dirt road leading to the river. In that early morning darkness, the rumble of the engines seemed more pronounced for some reason. It was a chorus of deep, subdued power, which waited to be unleashed. I assumed everyone knew we were taking a road that would lead us onto the pages of history books. Even if they were not so historically minded, it was impossible to not feel the anticipation in every man. After years of playing around the edges of what the world was afraid to call a war, we were finally taking the force of our military power into the backyard of the enemy. Word had come to us of similar crossings to the south, which had sent the NVA reeling before the American lines. Now it was our turn to cross the river into a Cambodian region where our intelligence had placed the NVA headquarters. As we inched along the road, behind the mine-sweeping teams, the tension consumed us.
The trees on either side of the darkened road reached high into the night sky. I couldn't tell how thick the woods were beyond the edge of the dirt road. It could have been a forest big enough to hide whole armies, but that was not what really worried me. What tugged at the elbow of my thoughts was the shadowy specter of the men walking in front of the tracks. Their dark figures moved relentlessly onward, waving their electronic devices over the surface of the road. In their awkward and terribly slow way, they were making sure the ground before us had not been prepared for disaster by the enemy. As they preceded us through the gloom, I found myself looking back over my shoulder again and again. The sun would rise behind us, and we had to be at the river before dawn.
Captain Meilstrup was keeping his own thoughts as the time ran and our progress remained interminably slow. Suddenly he stood up from his seat beside my gunner's hatch and looked behind us at the still-dark sky. He held out his hand to me and formed a fist. It was a sign I knew well. I hit the microphone button and called the company to a halt. We called the mine-sweeping team in, and Meilstrup had me call the platoon leaders to our track.
When the three lieutenants stood beside our track, looking up at us from the darkness, Captain Meilstrup reached over into the hatch where I kept the tommy gun. My bush hat was there, hung over the muzzle of that vintage weapon. The hat had a number of hand grenade pins woven into the looped hatband. The captain took three of the grenade rings from my hat. He bent the retaining pin of one of the rings double, making it the shortest of the three. He placed the pins in his fist, leaving only three rings sticking out, and leaned down toward the waiting lieutenants. The platoon leaders looked at each other, then each reached up and picked a ring. Lieutenant Phillips from 2nd Platoon had taken the short pin.
In curt, military terms, Meilstrup explained that the mine sweeping would take too long. We had to be at the river before first light, so we were going to bust the road. The faces of the platoon leaders were hard to read in the dark, but each of them knew what was to be done. The company would run for the river along a road that was most probably mined. Meilstrup pointed his finger at Phillips and said, in very flat command tones:
“Phillips, you're lead track. I'm right behind you. The rest of you pull in behind us and spread out your tracks fifty yards apart, so if they hit a mine they won't take anyone else with them. We'll be moving fast, so try to keep your interval.”
The idling of the engines was suddenly very deep in the still night. The three young officers looked at each other and awkwardly shook hands, then turned and walked off into the darkness. I have often wondered what they said to each other. I still wonder if Phillips kept that mutilated hand grenade pin that had placed him at the point of an invasion.
Carnes, our driver, pulled us out of line and moved us to the place where we would fall in line behind Phillips's lead track. When all the platoons reported to be ready, we started for the river. The company spread out and accelerated to as much speed as the twisting dirt road and the early morning dimness would allow. All I remember about that ride is that no one on the track said a word until, without incident, we pulled up to the river and the pontoon bridge that spanned it. We arrived just as the first light of morning filtered through the trees.
The bridge floated and bobbed in the current that was the watery border between nations. It had been prepared by the engineers and guarded by ARVN and Special Forces troops, who now watched us curiously as we carefully inched the heavy tracks over the floating highway. Phillips's track was first across, and one of his boys reached out and stuck a crudely printed sign on a tree with the stab of a bayonet. We were still the second track in line, and as we crossed the pontoon bridge and drove onto dry ground, I could read the hand-printed message. It said, plainly, “Welcome to Cambodia, 1/5 (Mech).” Irony strikes people at the oddest moments. Maybe that's what makes it ironic. At that moment, I recalled how many times during the past months I had wished I was somewhere other than Vietnam, and now I was.
Once across the river, we pulled over and deployed to cover the crossings of several other companies. When that was accomplished, we started out along a well-traveled dirt road that led us beyond the river and into a rich agricultural bottomland. The place was amazingly beautiful compared to Vietnam, which was just across the river. The rice fields were well kept, and the dikes were trimmed and neat, not unlike the curbed yards in an American suburb. Making a comparison between the pristine beauty of the Cambodian farmland and the bedraggled appearance of the Vietnamese countryside was unfair. Vietnam had been embroiled in one war after another for four decades, and the whole country seemed to be held together with chewing gum and kite string. Cambodia had remained pretty much untouched. As the lines of olive-drab military monsters made their way down the tree-shaded road, it was obvious that the situation had changed.
We expected the enemy to engage us at any moment, yet we moved deeper and deeper into Cambodian territory without a hint of resistance. We passed ox carts and old, French-made trucks that had been abandoned along the path of our march. It was a sign that there had been a surprised retreat of the general population, which was unaware of what was happening. It meant no news broadcasts or information of any kind had been disseminated to the farming communities that dotted the landscape near the river. Because of public announcements by President Nixon and the ambitious reporting of almost everyone in the broadcast news industry, the entire world must have known that American troops were storming across the river into NVA-held areas of Cambodia. The world knew what was happening, but the local farmers seemed to have been kept in the dark. They didn't know we were coming until we showed up in their front yards.
Another fact struck us, pretty early on. Though we saw all sorts of civilian signs along the roadside, we saw nothing of the North Vietnamese Army. This was somewhat unsettling. It either meant it was not there or it had performed an orderly pullback and was preparing a reception for us somewhere up ahead. Just as we were beginning to worry, something happened that changed our minds about the preparedness of the local NVA.
We pulled off the road and into a large open area that was lined with terribly tall palm trees. A small village could be seen in the distance, across the open fields. Meilstrup sent out recon tracks to check along the wood line and then started the company moving slowly in the direction of the village. We had not gone a hundred yards when the captain called a halt. One of the tall palm trees was immediately to our right. There, in the thin strip of shade provided by the trunk of the tall tree, sat an NVA backpack with an army pith helmet resting upon it. The pack and the helmet were retrieved and inspected. The equipment was new and without any signs of wear. The owner must have been lying in the limited shade of the tree when he heard our approach and ran for cover. We realized he was probably hiding in the surrounding wood line, watching us at that very moment.
We began to move again, a bit more cautiously this time, when we came across another of the packs. It, too, rested beneath one of the tall palm trees. It was then that we noticed that there was a pack and a helmet beneath every palm tree in sight. At that moment, a single rifle shot was fired at us from the wood line, and the action began.
Groups of NVA soldiers rose up from behind rice dikes, where they were hiding, and made attempts to run for the cover of the woods. Speeding tracks and heavy machine guns cut them off, making dead men and taking prisoners. Squads of APCs swept the woods with concentrated .50-caliber fire, and what resistance had been initiated from such cover melted away. Enemy soldiers seemed to be running everywhere. They appeared to be completely without discipline or intelligent command and bent only on escape. The whole incident was over in a few minutes, and we converged on the tiny village, surrounding it and throwing out recon platoons into the nearby woods. It was an attempt to again establish contact with the fleeing enemy.
The radio hummed in my headset with all sorts of reports and requests, but by now, Meilstrup had dismounted the command track and was moving on the ground through the village. He was communicating by the use of the PRC–25 radios, carried by his two RTOs. I was simply sitting in the gunner's hatch, listening to the mop-up action, when something hard hit my helmet. I was convinced that someone was shooting at me when a second missile hit my shoulder, and I found that it was a small pebble. I turned to discover that 1st Sergeant Strain was tossing rocks at me to get my attention. He motioned for me to get down off the track and follow him. I was a bit confused, but I grabbed the tommy gun and made my way to the ground.
I followed the top kick through the village and around the corner of a large stone building, which turned out to be the local Buddhist temple. There we found Captain Meilstrup, towering over a small monk who was wrapped in the traditional orange robe and looking at Meilstrup as if he had three heads. As we approached, the captain was using a combination of crude sign language and broken English to make himself understood by the diminutive monk.
“Are there many…beaucoup…ti ti…NVA? You understand NVA?…North Vietnamese?…We are American…. You know American?”
The captain's face showed real frustration, and the visage of the orange-clad holy man showed nothing but confusion. Meilstrup shook his head and turned to me, asking, “Stoney, didn't you say you took French in college?” I nodded, and the captain ordered me to see if I could get through to the monk. It was not an odd request, since the whole of Southeast Asia had been French Indochina at one time.
“Parlez-vous Francais?”
I felt awkward as the words came from my mouth, especially since I had all but flunked French in college. I pointed to myself and intoned, “Je suis American.”
The little monk looked at me with a sort of uncomfortable silence. His eyes kept darting to the huge muzzle of the tommy gun and then back to my face. It was obvious he had no idea what I had just asked him and wasn't quite sure whether I intended to shoot him or not. I looked at the captain and shook my head. Meilstrup shook his head and resumed the futile attempt to communicate through exaggerated gestures and fractured sentences.
“How many?…Many…NVA…North Vietnamese…How many NVA here?…How many…here?”
At this point the tiny monk opened his mouth and spoke with a clipped British accent that sounded for all the world like Prince Charles.
“Oh, I don't know, perhaps a thousand.”
The silent moment that followed was all but comical. When Meilstrup recovered from his shock, he asked in amazed tones, “You speak English?”
The small monk smiled indulgently and retorted, “Yes, but I was beginning to wonder about that.”
On that hot afternoon, filled with confusion and the sounds of war, the sarcastic wisdom of George Bernard Shaw had raised its head once again. It was Shaw who had observed that the English and the Americans are two peoples separated by a common language.