Some things I remember about Cambodia...
We first went thru the NVA base camps near the border / river we crossed. They had not been gone long from them. I picked up a "Chieu Hoi" leaflet that seemed to let them know we were on the way...The hammocks were in place, cooking utensils, shovels besides where they had been digging..We were in a lot of vegetation and somehow a big old scorpion got between the folds of the flak jacket I was sitting on and he was there under me most of the day...There were also nests of red ants ( "mogators" ) in trees..they wove the leaves together and put their eggs in them and when you hit them while sitting on the APC they would get all over you and sting and bite...Ouch !!T here were several villages not far away. The Cambodians were darker skinned and dressed differently than the Vietnamese. They were constantly bowing with their hands together. After an incident mentioned in another post, where the NVA attacked Co. A , 2/22(M) behind us and jets and choppers were called in..we moved a short distance away and were able to trade the villagers C-rats for some water, fruit, etc. and they were very nice. Some spoke broken English. A few days later we came across a soccer field that was in excellent condition. Of course that is where we set up for the night and dug it all up. That same afternoon four Buddhist monks came down the road in saffron robes. They seemed oblivious to the war around them. Much of the rest of our time was spent in the jungle areas, and we passed thru some of the larger towns.
At one point we passed a group of refugees walking along the road, and I heard later there were several NVA hiding among them and they were caught. We captured an NVA who had apparently had malaria for some time, as he had lost a lot of weight. He was dressed in tiger fatigues, and was really out of it. For some reason that day, they had us on foot ( we are mechanized..go figure ! ) in sort of a blocking mode...lots of bullets whizzing around...but nothing much happened..One of my platoon mates reminded me of the mad scramble we made in the middle of the night on June 30, to get out of Cambodia, going down the road at 40+ mph firing illum rounds out of the mortar tracks. He remembered getting fried eggs any way he wanted when we got back to Vietnam. The jumping off point to many operations in Cambodia was Thien Ngon. It was a SF basecamp at one time, but became a hot, smelly, wide open area with jungle all around. It had been sprayed with Agent Orange...One memorable week
at Thien Ngon when it rained constantly, everyone had the runs, and it seemed AFVN played "It's a Rainy Night in Georgia" all the time...In the March / April timeframe the South Vietnamese were supposed to have gone into Cambodia, and we provided support but didn't go over then. I could not understand why there wasn't more damage among the NVA base camps right up near the border, considering all the "secret bombing" that had been going on for years. I didn't recall any old bomb craters anywhere we went, come to think of it..as opposed to Vietnam, where they were everywhere..Our CO. was relieved of duty, as detailed in "Into Cambodia", after about 3 or so months, right after we went into Cambodia....Cambodia was a beautiful country. Maybe someday it will be able to recover from the horrors of the 1970s....
Larry
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06-01-2004, 09:52 PM
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