LBJ's Hired Gun

by John J. Gebhart

  THE VC SUBMARINE INCIDENT

  If you have been watching the History Channel, I am sure you are going to say that Sergeant Gebhart is really bullshitting you this time. At 2,000 feet up, riding over the South China Sea with Major Moose and company, I spotted a lone, fast-moving object in the clear blue water below. We were flying at that altitude because we always took fire from the village complexes on the coast below Chu Lai at Cape Batangan, so we usually flew around this trouble spot over the ocean to avoid a shoot-out on the way home to Chu Lai. This particular day had been slow and boring—an armed escort mission to help the 105mm artillery battalion move to a hill in the middle of nowhere, where not a shot had been fired. We watched a CH-46 deliver the 105mm pieces, then come back with ammo and finally water and C-rations. The gooks must have taken the day off.

  We were all in a hurry to get back to a cold can of Miller after a wasted no-action day. Suddenly I spotted a fast-moving object in the water. At 2,000 feet it looked small. I told Major Moose we had a VC submarine under us. He grabbed my field glasses and determined it was a great white shark. We went down to 500 feet and saw that the shark was headed up to the Chu Lai beaches to eat Marine swimmers.

  Major Moose said, “Let’s make a tuna fish salad out of him,” and both gunners opened up with our M-60s. The shark simply kept moving north to Chu Lai. He was probably under the water too far for the 7.62 bullets to get him. Major Moose then decided we had to save the free world from this menace. We went into a rocket attack, complete with outside machine guns blasting away. This got the shark’s attention and he started heading out into deeper water. The Major made another rocket attack, and this time we blew the shark to pieces. The water turned red and we saw his white underbelly. Corporal Cross, who had finally come back from Subic Bay and gotten promoted to Sergeant, was once more sitting in his crew chief’s spot. We both wasted a 200-round belt of M-60 rounds, making more blood. Smaller sharks and other fish came in for a late lunch on what was left of him.

  I asked Major Moose if we would get the Marine Corps Achievement Medal for saving Marine Corps swimmers from a vicious shark attack. He said to shut the hell up. If Colonel Nellie heard this story, Major Moose might be driving a desk in S-3 Operations instead of a gunbird. We wasted half our rockets killing this beast. 1966 was getting to be a chickenshit year for fun, and every rocket used now had to be accounted for. The Navy was cheap when it came to spending money on Marine toys, so we made up a story that we took sniper fire on the artillery LZ set-up operation.

  THE BEETLE-TOOTHED OLD LADY WHO EXPLODED

  One beautiful day, we assisted a 5th Marines ground operation. The Marines landed in choppers and advanced toward a large village complex. We flew directly over the village and took no fire. I looked through my field glasses and saw no one with a rifle. All the villagers came out to greet the Marines yelling out, “You number one!” I had seen this situation a million times before—the Marines move through the village, finding only old ladies, old men and kids. When they have their backs turned, out rings a shot, usually from an SKS carbine, and down goes a Marine. The Marines hit the dirt and are usually out in the open. Next come the automatic-fire RPD machine guns. This is why two gunbirds fly 50 feet over the village, just waiting for the shit to hit the fan. The gooks know we will waste them all if one shot is fired. With our sun visors on over our helmets, gunners look like giant bugs waiting to bite.

  On this particular day, all the villagers stayed put as the Marines advanced on their village. As I watched through my field glasses, I spotted an old beetle-toothed lady looking nervous. She was carrying a yoke with a bucket of something heavy on each side. Suddenly she broke from the standing crowd of fellow villagers and took off for a nearby tree line. I followed her movement and wondered why she was running with this yoke around her neck under such a heavy load. The Marines had a saying, “If they run, they are suspects. If they are killed, they are confirmed VCs.”

  I instinctively pulled back my M-60 bolt and shot a long half-belt burst of tracer fire at her. To our utter surprise, she blew up. Pieces of her body actually hit the plastic bubble of our low-flying Huey. She was carrying explosives—probably booby traps she didn’t have time to set up. The crew congratulated me, and when we went down to ten feet and hovered, the woman had made a two-foot hole in the ground. Sergeant Cross, who had been recently promoted, shook my hand, and said I finally had learned the game of being a good gunner. We didn’t feel sorry for her, because we had often escorted CH-34 Med-Evac choppers evacuating Marine grunts whose legs had been blown off by booby traps. The enemy didn’t want to stand up and fight us, but their endless mines and booby traps had injured hundreds of gung-ho Marines.

  NUMBER TEN’S DEADLY DESCENT

  Once again we got assigned to Operation Dirty Brass, and painted over the US Marine decals. This time we teamed up with Gunbird #10. Major Moose briefed everyone that the border with Laos was bad news, and that we had been shot down last time we went on this mission. Therefore, we would stay up at 1,200 feet and use field glasses to observe what Victor Charlie was up to. If we took .51-caliber anti-aircraft fire, we were to take evasive action and get the hell out of there.

  We loaded up, landed at the end of the runway, armed our outboard machine guns and rocket pads, and off we went westward bound for the mountains and forests of the Vietnam-Laotian border. We once again saw trucks coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Major Moose had to make a low-level run at tree top level to see endless NVA hopping down the trail with bushes on their backs and helmets. We made this run so fast the zips didn’t even have time to shoot at us.

  Back up at 1,200 feet we once again felt safe, and after watching them for a good ten minutes, we turned to return to Chu Lai. Both Sergeant Cross and I were happy to get out of this hazardous area. We sat back in our seats and looked at the jungle below. Suddenly a burst of .51-caliber anti-aircraft fire came tearing through the air and hit our sister ship to our rear left. It must have taken a hit in its engine, for the next thing we heard was, “May Day! We’re hit! We’re going down!” Number 10 went into an emergency autorotation and disappeared into a triple-canopy jungle, a three-layer jungle of high trees, vines and foliage. We marked their position on our maps and tried to get them on our radio to no avail. We believed they autorotated into 180-foot trees covered with foliage. The crash site was too hot for us to stay —.51-calibers mean dee-dee to gunbirds. We couldn’t risk getting shot down again.

  We called the Jolly Green Giant to come and rescue them. This was a special Air Force bullet-proof rescue CH-53 chopper with a steel cage it lowered through the jungle. Each UH-IE gives off a special radio beacon signal. This wasn’t turned on, which indicated to us that everyone in Gunbird #10 had died in the initial crash. On the other hand, we had not seen a fireball of JP-4 fuel blow up, so maybe, just maybe, at least some of them had survived. But why didn’t they activate their radio beacon?

  We hoped for the best, but deep down in the pit of our stomachs, we knew they were all dead. The slimy zips had shot the second gunbird so we couldn’t see where the fire came from. If they had shot the lead ship, the second gunbird would have tried to make a gun and rocket run on them, because they would have seen the source of the fire. Losing a gunbird and the four-member crew was a hit in the balls to us. We were all in a state of denial. We looked at the sky and saw we were all alone. We returned to base, hoping against hope that maybe the Jolly Green Giant got them out. The Jolly Green Giant lowered a man down into the jungle, but failed to locate the downed bird. The jungle simply ate them up. They drowned in a sea of high trees on the Laotian side of the border.

  To this day, I wonder if they are still there. It haunted us all at Klondike. How could the zips climb up 180-foot trees to get them? I hope after 37 years that their remains have been found and returned to the USA. I know they have teams of Americans looking for and digging up crash sites. May God guide #10 to the gates of heaven. As long as there are Klondike squadron members still alive
, their unselfish devotion to duty will always be remembered and praised. May they rest in peace. Amen.

  THE TRAWLER INCIDENT

  One sunny hot day we were assigned Convoy Escort Duty. This is where two gunbirds fly over a Marine Corps truck convoy and protect it from VC ambushes. These missions are very boring. The local zips would see all the trucks coming up the highway with .50-caliber machine guns on top of them, complete with us flying overhead, so they would never attack. Thus we took small side trips we called “skunk hunting,” to see what kind of trouble we could get into. We would fly very low to draw fire from local villages or tree lines. The gunner in the lead chopper would throw out a red smoke grenade, and then the second gunbird would do a gun run on the red smoke area. These shoot-outs were a source of excitement and great fun. If things got out of hand and the zips had a .51-caliber anti-aircraft weapon, or we took too much fire, we would call in fixed-wing jets and blow them back into the Stone Age.

  On this particular afternoon, we had just about exhausted all our rockets and machine gun belts wasting a small village that was chock full of bad guys. The chopper floor was littered with empty link belts, so we returned to the nearby convoy and watched it roll into Chu Lai. We were about to head up five miles to home and call it a day, when we received an urgent call from a local Bird Dog Army Observation Plane. Bird Dog had just seen an 80-foot steel-hull fishing trawler beach itself on the reefs off Ba Tangan Peninsula, near Quang Ngai City, about a seven-minute trip down the coast from Chu Lai. A coast guard patrol boat in Operation Market had chased the trawler onto the beach. It was loaded with 7.62 x 54 Mosin Nagant Russian rifles and carbines and cases of ammo.

  Even though we had no outside machine gun ammo or rockets, we still had a few belts of M-60 ammo inside. We made it to the trawler in record-breaking time. The VCs were unloading ammo and bundles of rifles tied together into sampans, working like busy little bees. We made a gun run on them, and Sergeant Cross and I shot the shit out of the ship’s hull. The zips started shooting back. We made about four gun runs and our second gunship made two runs. The zips were now working like mad to unload the rifles.

  Major Moose said we had to keep them busy and harass them until Land Shark Alpha sent more gunbirds and fixed-wing aircraft. He had Lieutenant Chase drive while he shot his M-16 rifle out the helicopter window. He missed all the zips, but loved the hell out of shooting at them. Next, Sergeant Cross pulled out his M-2 sawed-off suicide gun. He let loose a couple of magazines and was out of .30-caliber carbine ammo. Our next gun run was with my M&P .38-caliber pistol and Sergeant Cross’s S&W .357 Mag revolver. We missed the VCs by at least 50 yards. Try that for fun, making helicopter gun runs with pistols at VCs who are shooting back.

  Finally help arrived. Two fully armed UH-IEs from our outfit blew the shit out of the sampans and killed a number of zips in the bargain. We stayed on station for another five minutes and watched the show. It was like a World War II movie. The gunship raked the deck of the trawler with M-60 machine gun fire. It was great to watch. Finally Oxwood Phantom jets dropped 500 and 1,000 pound bombs and blew up the whole ship. The blown-up rifles looked like pretzels. Land Shark Alpha sent in a company of the 7th Marines to clean up and all they found were dead zips and twisted rifles. The Lieutenant in charge of this company sent over a ruined rifle to our Colonel, thanking him for all his help in stopping the arms from being unloaded from the trawler.

  Out of the 240 missions I flew, this one was in the top ten for sheer, raw courage. We must have been out of our minds to take on armed VCs with pistols, but we kept them busy until help arrived. It was exciting beyond belief and I still enjoy remembering it.

  Our motto at Klondike: “The difficult we do right away. The impossible takes another ten minutes.”

  THE HEDGE THAT MOVED

  One day we had convoy escort from Quang Ngai City to Chu Lai Air Base. It was very boring watching the line of 6x6 trucks riding up Route 1 from 1,200 feet up. The zips must have taken the day off—there were no incidents whatsoever. Thus we headed home, hoping two-shot Charley would shoot at our choppers. He must have gone to the beach and taken the day off too.

  About two minutes from landing at Ky Ha, we heard an urgent call for help from Bird Dog, our Army observation friends. A Marine Recon team was trapped on top of a large mountain at the edge of I-Corp’s area near the Laotian border. They had been there for a few days, and the zips had gotten wise and sent a company of fully equipped NVA up there to wipe them out.

  The Recon team’s call sign was “Turkey Misfits.” They must have landed on the side of the mountain and then hauled ass up to the top like mountain goats. The mountain looked like something out of Switzerland. When we arrived on station, the very top was covered in clouds and as cold as the Antarctic. The trees and foliage stopped about 200 yards from the summit and the rest of the mountain was just small bushes and scrub grass.

  It wasn’t easy to find these trapped Marines in the mist and fog and clouds. Finally the Recon team told us they heard our engine sounds. We arrived overhead, but couldn’t even see them. They explained their situation: three wounded, and they were low on C-rations, water and ammo. They had seen all they wanted to see and now they wanted to climb down to the helicopter LZ and get out in one piece, but they could not get to the CH-34 choppers because of intense ground fire.

  Bird Dog flew around the mountain but was unable to spot the NVA. Every time the Marines came out of the clouds and were visible, they took intense automatic weapon fire. These were not local VCs with SKS carbines or M-1 carbines taken off ARVN soldiers who threw them away and ran. They were NVAs determined to wipe out the team, and were probably monitoring their radio calls for immediate emergency evacuation. They didn’t dare shoot at our gunbirds. We flew all over this mountaintop and I used my field glasses, but still saw absolutely nothing. We began to think the Recon team was exaggerating their situation to get back to their base camp.

  Finally, we flew through the clouds, circled the hilltop, and went around the peak, flying lower and lower. Suddenly I saw a sight that totally amazed me. The first time around the treeless area near the top, I had seen a row of hedges about 50 yards from the tree line. The second time we circled the hill, the hedge was a good 150 yards from the tree line. That hedgerow walked like a precision drum and bugle high school band. I asked Major Moose, “When is a bush not a bush?” He said, “When it moves.” I opened up at the hedge with an M-60. The NVAs cried out in pain and rolled down the steep mountain slope, dead. We must have really pissed them off, because after we wasted them their buddies in the tree line opened up on us. We made a number of rocket and machine gun runs on the tree line, and wasted more of them until they disappeared into the foliage.

  Turkey Misfit came down with their wounded to the waiting CH-34 transport choppers, and we stayed on station until everyone was aboard. We flew escort back to Chu Lai and watched them land at the 93rd Evacuation Hospital. The Recon team was worn-out but very happy to be home. I was happy for wasting 20 or so NVAs on the side of a steep hill in the middle of nowhere. We marked 40 dead zips on the death board. As Major Moose said, “If it doesn’t look right, waste it with a belt of M-60 tracers.”

  We were totally amazed how disciplined these NVA were to move in perfect unison across an open field, and how hard it was to see them in the mist and clouds. We all went to bed thanking God we had killed them before they wasted the Recon team.

  THE OLD MAN AND THE SWIMMING HOLE

  One cloudy day we were on the dawn patrol, looking for trouble. I was peering through my trusty field glasses, traveling about 500 feet over the local villages, when I spotted a Vietnamese girl taking a bath. She was in the middle of a small water hole, standing in water up to her waist. It was a peaceful setting, with a thatched roof hut next to the swimming hole and a large palm tree. I contacted the Major and we went over to look at her tender young body. She was built like a brick shithouse. The back blast from the chopper pushed the water away, totally exposi
ng her entire naked body. This was a cheap thrill for us and we enjoyed it. We even tried to take some pictures.

  No sooner did we start taking pictures than an old man in black pajamas came out of the house with an SKS carbine. The villagers the US had armed to guard against the VC had old M-1 rifles—but this guy sure wasn’t on our side, carrying a ChiCom weapon like that. We flew right over his head, aimed our M-60s at him, and motioned for him to put the rifle down. We did this for about three minutes to no avail. The young girl disappeared into the nearby village. No one wanted to harm the old man, who looked like Ho-Chi-Minh. He was given every opportunity to lay down his weapon, but instead he aimed it at us and starting shooting. He must have been really pissed at us for taking pictures of the young girl. Perhaps it was his daughter.

  The SKS holds ten shots and he unloaded them all. He then started reloading, as he hid behind a giant palm tree. Both gunners could have wasted him, but we didn’t. Luckily, his rifle shots only hit our helicopter skids and the ammo boxes under our seat. The Major said, “This old man has got to go!” The Major made a hard right turn and took the chopper out about 400 yards and up to about 800 feet, and the next thing I saw, he had the rocket sights down, lining them up with the old man. He launched two 2.75 rockets and blew the old man to Kingdom Come and got the palm tree too.