CUE: Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On, JERRY LEE LEWIS
It seemed every unit that crossed the border found itself chasing a fleeing enemy. The obvious fact that the NVA was involved in a headlong but staggered retreat from its former established positions was encouraging, but a bit confusing. It was running off and leaving all sorts of supplies and munitions that had been hand carried to these locations from North Vietnam. What we began to stumble into was amazing.
For several days, we made sporadic contact with the enemy, which always ended with them breaking off the combat and melting farther back into the wooded countryside. Then one morning my headset buzzed with reports from our point element that it had found some bunkers. As it turned out, it had not just found some bunkers, it had stumbled into the entire headquarters complex of the North Vietnamese Army.
We moved carefully to determine the size of the complex and were astounded to discover that the bunkers stretched for hundreds of yards. It was truly a base camp, underground. There were hospital bunkers, complete with primitive operating rooms. There were arms bunkers, still filled with RPGs and explosives. There were classrooms and map rooms and even offices wired with field telephones. We found everything from huge stores of rice to intelligence that had been gathered and hand carried across the river from Vietnam.
As the men from the Intelligence Corps were going through the plastic bags filled with captured American maps and documents, one of them pulled out a pair of American dog tags and read aloud the name stamped on them.
“Sgt. Dan O. Collins.”
To his surprise, the intelligence officer heard a reply from just outside the bunker.
“Yeah.”
As it turned out, Dan Collins was the radio operator for the artillery forward observer who was assigned to C Company. Collins had lost his dog tags somewhere in the Michelin rubber plantation in February. At that moment, he was standing just outside a large hole in the ground, in another country, where army intelligence people had just pulled those same dog tags out of a mildewed plastic bag. The whole incident seemed like an episode from the TV show Ripley's Believe It or Not.
With the find of this major cache of weapons and information, we all thought that our company would stop and guard the area while the intelligence types did their thing. As usual, the surmising of the men of C Company was in error. The chore of guarding the captured NVA headquarters was taken over by another mechanized company, and we were thrown, once again, into the search for the retreating enemy.
Charging off through the tall trees, we were unaware of how the news of our invasion had played out before the rest of the world. As is so often the case with American politics, this move into Cambodia had its fans and its detractors. People who had sons fighting in Vietnam wanted the war to come to an end and their sons to be safe from the NVA, which had been protected from American attack in the sanctuaries of Cambodia. These folks were applauding President Nixon for his bold move to deny the enemy its safe haven. Those who were against the military action in Vietnam and were protesting in various ways already, protested this new action as well. Such a split in the political firmament had a way of causing the powers that be to seek new and even more disgusting ways to cover their political behinds. As it turned out, Nixon was no exception.
As C Company, 1st of the 5th, made its way deeper and deeper into the Cambodian countryside, the word came to us that Nixon had appeared on international television and announced that US forces had, indeed, pressed across the Mekong River into Cambodia. He then declared that US troops would not penetrate beyond a certain point into that country. Essentially what he had done was to draw a line on the map and tell the enemy that if it could scamper back behind this line on the map, the big, bad Americans would not touch it. That explained why the enemy was abandoning everything and retreating so completely. All it had to do was fall back behind the safe lines and it would be secure to regroup and press attacks on our forces from strongholds we were forbidden to attack. It was Vietnam all over again.
The line of our tracks was moving through a sparsely wooded area when the landscape began to change. The forest grew dense and the trees became larger, stretching high into the sky. This was not a good area for tracked vehicles. The big trees limited the avenue of movement for the APCs, and the increased height of such vegetation made air support difficult. For a smaller force to attack a larger one, it was important to find ground where air support was difficult or impossible to use. The aggressors would then have to get in close enough to engage the enemy so that artillery could not be called into play for fear of hitting friendly troops. It was an ideal spot for a sizable ambush, which is exactly what occurred. It might have worked had it not been for a mechanical malfunction that happened at exactly the right spot.
George Bradley had recently become the driver of the Two Four track. As he urged the machine through the woods, a track block came loose, and the APC was halted in place to await repair. The rest of the company moved forward, slipping neatly into a rather large horseshoe of concealed NVA troops—a favorite tactic of the enemy and one we had encountered before. When the firing began, the enemy sent troops to close the end of the horseshoe and surround us. Instead, they ran into Bradley and the men of the Two Four track, who put up a whale of a fight and kept the ambush from closing around us.
The attack opened with a sharp explosion that killed Oscar Solis. RPGs crippled the lead track, and the company returned fire with everything we had. Those of us who were .50-caliber gunners chewed up the surrounding wood line with such heavy fire that the enemy could not move toward us. We needed to back out of the ambush area to a distance that would be out of range of the enemy weapons but well within the reach of our heavy machine guns and mortars. The fact that the Two Four track was holding open the door for such a withdrawal gave us the ability to move out of the ambush zone and then strike again on ground of our own choosing. We had taken the element of surprise away from the enemy.
We gathered our killed and wounded and made the move just before the sun set. The night that followed was tense and filled with anticipation of an attack in the dark. Such an attack did not materialize. With the coming of the morning sun, we saddled up and prepared to press the enemy again. We entered the area of the conflict from the day before and spread out in attack formation. We made our way closer and closer to the line where the NVA had been entrenched the afternoon before. I gripped the handles of the machine gun and tried hard not to let anyone see how much I was thinking about the bullet marks that adorned the heavy steel shield of my gunner's hatch. I hadn't noticed any fire being directed at me during the previous attack. I hadn't even noticed the bullet marks until we neared the place of the former day's action. Suddenly I did notice, and with the notice came the fear.
The steady drone of the diesel engine seemed to rumble up my spine. I looked to my left at Carnes, who seemed perfectly calm. He seemed, in fact, like a man taking the family car on a Sunday drive, rather than a soldier pressing his APC into the face of a certain melee with North Vietnamese regulars. It caused me to try to look as relaxed as I possibly could. It was an act that was terribly transparent to anyone who saw my face.
Steadily onward we moved. Slowly but surely we advanced into the face of the enemy. We pressed forward until we reached the spot where they had been before, and pushed beyond that. We kept a slow, steady pace until we cleared the trees and came to a wide open meadow, where we halted. The North Vietnamese were gone. There was no sign of them. They had evidently slipped out during the night and left the area to us.
After much air reconnaissance and some probing around by recon units, it became obvious that the NVA had been fighting a delaying action with us. They were willing to expose themselves to superior firepower in a desperate effort to slow us down. We began to wonder what they may have been protecting. What was in our path that they had to protect?
The intelligence people flew in and out of our area repeatedly. They checked the dead enemy soldiers and asked us a bunch of questions that made very little sense, then came to the conclusion that a radar sighting of an unidentified aircraft, which had landed and taken off near our position during the night, was the answer to this puzzle. They assumed that the NVA had been protecting something or someone until they were able to get one of their few aircraft into the area and safely remove this prize. Whether it was true or not, the fact remains that after the mysterious aircraft left the area, the troops in front of us simply melted away into the countryside.