Agony in Cambodia: A War Story

Agony in Cambodia

A War Story

By

Rod Keith

Published by Dunnottar Publishing

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This book is a work of fiction. Although some locations are actual places, the names, characters, events, organizations and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or incidents, is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 10: 0988346214

ISBN 13: 978-0-988-3462-1-5

Copyright © 2013 by Rod Keith

All Rights Reserved

Agony in Cambodia

A War Story

By

Rod Keith

Chapter One

Asylum

September 12, 1963

They were all around him and he knew he was going to die. Where had they come from, these little people with their small hands, moving mechanically, systematically, through the bodies lying lifeless on the ground? Uniformed North Vietnamese Army regulars were positioned among these peasant people, but he only counted four. There could be more, he thought, but from his location, most appeared to be indigenous hill people. The bodies of what was once his team were scattered all around the burning wreckage of the Choctaw. Nobody was moving.

The rain had come early on this day. Pounding monsoon rains beat a steady tattoo on the fragmented metal that was once their helicopter. He looked at this grisly scene again and tried to shake loose the cobwebs that possessed his brain. Although he tried his best, he couldn’t get his eyes to focus. Everything around him looked disjointed, out of sync. The next thing he knew he was bombarded with a series of blinding, strobe-like flashes, accompanied by an incessant pounding between his ears. He cautiously raised his head and, through bloody and puffy sand-filled eyes, once again surveyed the area. Through the dizziness, he counted four of the other five guys from his LRRP Team, one by one, their lifeless bodies broken and bloody on the ground. The fifth was missing. Who wasn’t there? He started naming them, trying to generate a rational thought from this irrational and devastating scene.

Second Lieutenant John Hartley, the team’s leader, was lying face down at the edge of the sandbar, half submerged in the shallow waters on the banks of the Mekong. Bill spotted Angie Rossi and Freddie Castillo, too; they were together in death as they were in life during their tours of duty in Southeast Asia. Their mangled bodies were lying on the sandbar, about thirty feet away, in a direct line between Bill and the Choctaw. SSgt. Billy Ray Armitage was number four. His legs were pinned under the fuselage and, although he couldn’t tell for sure from his vantage point, it looked like Billy Ray’s torso had been severed. He probably never knew what hit him.

That’s when it hit him. It was Doc! Doc wasn’t there! Where was Doc? Was he behind the carcass of the Choctaw and out of Bill’s line of sight? Was he under the massive, mangled mass of metal there on the sandbar? Maybe, Bill thought, that was the case, and Doc was still with him; he was still alive back there somewhere beyond the wreckage of their chopper.

Bill glanced to his right, across the middle finger of the three-pronged spit of land jutting into the river, beyond the overflowing river to the forest beyond. He searched for an escape route. About a hundred yards away, a stand of Kadam trees, some reaching sixty to seventy feet high, stood guard, like stovepipe straight soldiers at attention. They towered above the expanse of elephant grass beyond the river’s edge, their reddish-orange flowering heads fighting the onslaught of torrential rain that was pelting the area. Bill had seen sporadic evidence of these large evergreens throughout his travels in Southeast Asia, but they were especially plentiful in this part of Cambodia. His eyes darted back to the smoldering wreckage that used to be their chopper. He once again turned his attention to his scattered team lying there on this small insignificant spray of sand that injected itself into a wide and shallow bend of the river. He could make out a large island that split the Mekong at this point just a few clicks south of Peam Chileang, the small village that was their intended LZ.

It was September, and Southeast Asia was once again at the mercy of the annual monsoons. Every year in late June the rains began in this part of Cambodia, reaching their peak during the months of September and October. It wouldn’t begin to dry up along the ever widening shores of the Mekong for at least another three months. The flooding came from the overburdened northern lakes and rivers of China, Laos, and northern Cambodia that gave up their banks and escaped southward. These life giving waters carried and deposited the rich soil that provided an ancient way of life for the people of the lower Mekong River Valley and the Delta far below.

It was a time that was favored by Special Ops. It was raining again today and the rain had come early. The heavy rains never held to any predictable timetable. The torrential storms usually proved to be beneficial for recon work, especially work performed this far from their base of operations at Cu Chi. It was a bit unusual, this rain, in that it began in the early morning hours, rather than the afternoon. Not much moved during the monsoon season in Southeast Asia. Heavy rains usually meant little chance of engagement. Things were far from quiet today and it would be a long time before they would be quiet again for Bill Harper.

Suddenly, it seemed that all of his body parts were talking to him, in unison. It was a chorus of pain; a high opera of tortured nerve endings. The hellish scene before him reached out, snatched him by the brain and shook him by the scruff of his soul, forcing a shudder that reverberated throughout his entire body. He fumbled for his sidearm, but it wasn’t there. His bloody right hand moved slowly over the empty holster on his hip, tracing the outside seam of his torn fatigue pants. He strained his extended, trembling fingers in an attempt to grab the V-42 Stiletto strapped to his right jump boot. His aching body wouldn’t cooperate. He wanted to scream, to do something, anything, that would stop the panic that was beginning to set in, but he couldn’t. He wasn’t ready for this. He wasn’t ready for the bullet they were going to put through his brain, or the knife that he knew they would eventually thrust through his chest or throat as soon as he was discovered there, isolated and stranded. He closed his eyes, and for the first time in the last twenty four months, Bill Harper prayed. Help me, he cried. If you’re up there, please help me!

He forced himself to focus his attention back to the crash site. Two Green Sandpipers and a Pintail Snipe, oblivious to the carnage around them, scooted back and forth across the sandbar, stabbing and pecking at small invertebrates in the sandy soil. As he looked beyond them, Bill saw that the pilot and co-pilot were still belted and held firmly in their seats at the controls of their smoldering CH-34A Choctaw. He could see them through the shattered split glass window of the cockpit, their bodies twisted and bloody and misshapen. The pilot’s eyes were wide open, angled skyward, as if he was looking for something beyond the tops of a large cluster of Rumdel trees at the river’s edge. He could smell the sweet scent of flowers scattered among the branches of the tall trees. The fragrance mingled with the smell of burning rubber and oil created a strangely noxious odor.

His stomach was beginning to revolt. His gaze once again fell on the chopper.

The co-pilot was hanging, half in and half out of the right front cockpit window, his head strangely twisted and hanging. His life’s blood flowed down his twisted arm, over the back of his slack right hand, dripping slowly into the sand.

They’d had a door gunner named Pete assigned to them that morning just before take-off. It would be his last mission, too. His headless torso was slumped in the door of the Choctaw, his hands stretched out in front of him as if trying to ward off death.

They had started their descent and were coming in low over the jungle canopy, heading for their LZ when they encountered the heavy ground fire.

Later on, Bill would try to reconstruct the take-down of their plane. Whether it was from .50 Caliber fire or from ZPU-4 quad 14.5 mm anti-aircraft machine gun or 122 mm Katyusha rockets, it didn’t much matter.

He recalled that the old warhorse started springing leaks from the bullet-riddled hydraulic lines overhead, spewing pink fluid all over the already slimy floor. It sprayed over Bill and his team as they sat waiting; waiting for deployment at the landing zone they were never going to reach.

One last Long Range Recon Patrol before getting back to a civilization he could understand — back to a place where he felt he belonged. Nobody on that chopper knew what the fates held as they lifted off that morning. It was just another mission, lost amid the dozens of other missions they had undertaken.

He didn’t remember the actual contact with the sandbar. He did remember feeling like the earth was reaching for them. Bill was spared the memory of the union of the chopper and the ground, but surveying the aftermath exposed the violence that had intruded on this otherwise serene setting.

From his position away from the wreckage, Bill could see that one small group of five or six of the indigenous tribal people in the group were collecting sidearms, AR-15s, and some of the team’s other weapons scattered on the ground. As they scoured the area, he watched one of them bend over and pick up his Thompson.

Across the sandbar, he saw another small group of four or five of them going through pockets and tearing off watches and hacking off ring fingers with knives that looked longer than their arms. They were all chattering excitedly as they pulled boots and shirts and belts off the bodies of the men on the ground. They had the look of people operating like this was just another day’s work. There was no doubt in his mind. He was going to die, just as surely as the others who lay dead amid the wreckage of their chopper.

A sudden and spasmodic twitching in both of Bill’s legs brought him back to his current circumstance. The scene before him was surreal. The Lily of the Valley orchids and Medusa’s Heads were in bloom. The broad leaf palms and betel trees joined with the Kadams and Rumdels and accented the multiple green layers of the forest that surrounded this spot. Although he couldn’t see them, he heard the nervous chatter of a couple of long tailed Macaques, fighting through the thick brush. The sudden rush of activity had disrupted the natural beauty and tranquility of this small piece of the Cambodian landscape. The clamor of birds overhead joined with the frenzy of the animals on the ground. The Painted Storks, Laughing Thrushes, and Sarus Cranes shrieked and danced a frenzied ballet overhead, while their continuous alarm penetrated deep into the lush, green vegetation of canopied forest around them. Their convulsive chatter transferred immediately to Bill. He felt immense panic and he knew he didn’t have much time to think about how to get out of there.

Waves of nausea surrounded him and he jettisoned the contents of his stomach onto the sand. His vomit was mixed with the blood that had flowed down his throat from a two-inch long gash inside his upper lip. His teeth had gone through his lip and out the other side, exposing swollen, raw meat. He shook his head in an attempt to clear the fog, to rid his brain of the tangled cobwebs lodged there. How had he arrived at this place, a good sixty feet from the chopper and the others? Reason told him that the impact of the crash had jettisoned him through the open right gunner’s door of the Choctaw to this spot, but he remembered none of what brought him here. He had come to rest in a prone position at a place just over the crest of the sandbar, his five-foot-ten inch frame facing the crash site and just out of a direct line of sight of the people who were still busily scavenging the area. His face was swollen, his eyes were nearly shut and blood was obscuring his vision. His light brown hair was matted with blood and sand. Rain mixed with blood from a three-inch cut on the top of his head and trickled down his face and off his nose, collecting in a small pool directly beneath his chin. A sharp pain shot down his right leg. He was frozen with fear and the icy-hot fingers of panic gripped him from his gut to his chest and straight on through to his throbbing head.

He watched as all of those busy hands moved among the dead, plucking things off bodies that had no say; bodies that couldn’t speak for themselves, that couldn’t fight for their right to be left alone. He was going to die just like the other five guys that made up his A-Team, just like the three crewmen from the chopper were already dead. The CH-34A lay on its side, flames from burning oil and rubber licked at the helpless, broken machine on the ground. Smoke spiraled upward, a smothering vortex of black soot and ash that hid the birds soaring above and darkened the already dark and moisture laden air. The chopper looked like some sort of huge prehistoric, crippled mantis. Three of its four main rotor blades were grotesquely bent and the fourth was buried deep within the sandbar. The fuselage was broken in half and the tail rotor section was missing; probably somewhere in the brush beyond the river’s edge, Bill thought. The flight deck was riddled with holes that confirmed the surface to air and small arms fire taken from the ground. He remembered the sounds as their chopper took fire from the ground. It was like riding in a washtub that was being assaulted by a hail storm. Transmission fluid and hydraulic fluid flowed from the ruptured hoses and reserve tanks in the cavity of the helicopter. Bill looked at this once dependable, life saving aircraft and shook his head. It was still recognizable, but only barely. The front of the chopper, from the nose to the air vents of the cowl directly in front of the shattered cockpit windows, was completely caved in, the tires were flattened, and both main struts were broken and bent. He looked at his left hand, stretched out in front of him on the ground, pointed in a direct line towards the downed chopper. The flesh on the back of his hand, from the second joints of his first and second fingers nearly to the back of his wrist had been ripped away and both knuckle bones were exposed on each finger. He managed to drag his left arm toward him and drove it into a small pool of water, pushing further into the cool, soft sand and mud beneath. He was hoping that action would somehow slow the bleeding and take away some of the pain.

His first thought was to try to snake his way to the edge of the river and let the current carry him to the mangrove swamps they had flown over earlier downriver. There he could hide; there he could heal a bit and plan his route back to the safety of the border area. He sure as hell didn’t want to be caught alive here in Cambodia. Being caught doing reconnaissance work in this country while the folks back home were being told that they weren’t there was the biggest danger any of them could face.

The locals were almost finished looting of the crash site, and it was only a matter of time before the ever widening circle of their search brought them to his small hiding place.

Bill’s body began to tremble. Then he began to shake uncontrollably again. Shit, he thought, I’m going into shock! Bill felt the light slipping away. He was passing out. Jesus, no!