by Robert Mason
“Ah, roger, Red Two, wait one.” We circled at 2000 feet about a mile away.
“Red Two, this is Preacher Six.” Major Williams was now on the horn. “I have just talked to the air force, and I agreed that you would land to do an on-site inspection.”
Leese, in his capacity as aircraft commander, answered. “Preacher Six, Red Two. We have already confirmed that no one is at the crash site, alive or dead. We have already risked more than we should have to determine this.”
Leese should have known better than to try to be logical.
“Whether you have risked enough is my decision, Red Two. You are ordered to proceed to the crash site and land. You will then have your crew get out and inspect the wreckage firsthand. Over and out.”
There was silence. I’m sure Leese considered telling him to stuff it, but he had to play his role.
He played it correctly. “Affirmative.”
We were now back at the wreckage, circling once again in a scrotum-stretching Leese special. The left side of the Huey was really straight down. After two of these furious turns, he pulled away to set up his approach. He had decided not to try to land in the wreckage-strewn clearing itself because we wouldn’t be able to land far enough away from the fire and the exploding ammo. Just behind the point of impact, there was a natural thin spot in the jungle where a few bare, 75-foot trees stood. It certainly wasn’t big enough to put a Huey there, but that’s where he was headed. Leese was going to show me another trick.
He settled into a hundred-foot hover directly over the tall trees and moved around searching for the right spot to play lawnmower. He had Reacher and the gunner lean out to watch the very delicate tail rotor. He found what he liked and began to let the helicopter settle down into the trees.
He had picked the spot perfectly. The tail boom with the spinning rotor on the end had a clear slot to follow down to the ground. The main rotor only had to chop a few two-inch-thick branches off some trees, a maneuver not even hinted at in flight school. When they hit the first branches, it sounded like gunfire.
Splintered wood flew everywhere. Treetops towered above us as we chopped our way down. We settled to the ground amid swirling debris, ass end low on a gentle slope covered with dense undergrowth. There was a moment of silence as the twigs and leaves settled around us. Nothing had been broken.
Reacher and the gunner grabbed their rifles and leapt into the thick tangle of weeds, galloping toward the still-exploding wreckage. The cords from their flight helmets trailed behind them.
Leese and I sat at the bottom of the vertical tunnel he had cut, our heads swiveling on nervous lookout. So far, only the sound of exploding ammo occasionally popped over the sound of the Huey. Reacher and the gunner disappeared through the thicket of trees between us and the wreckage.
We waited.
Whumpl Whump, whump! Mortars! From wherever they were hiding, the NVA launched their worst.
We were alone. HQ had not sent a gunship for escort or even another slick to watch over us. Leese and I looked at each other as the mortars got closer. His mouth was thin and his jaw was tight. I wondered if this was as bad as landing gliders. In the dense foliage around us I heard the mortars crashing heavily, shaking the air, searching for us. They sounded like the footfalls of a drunken giant. A big crunch nearby, then one to the side, then another behind us as the invisible giant staggered around trying to stomp us. The NVA were very good with their mortars, but it took time to zero in on a new target like us. Since they couldn’t see us from where they were, they had to walk the rounds back and forth until they got us.
Just when my fear was at an all-time high, Reacher and the gunner finally broke through the thicket to release us from the trap. They were both pale with fear as they dove on board. Leese had never let the Huey relax, so to speak. He had been ready to go at any second. As the two men hit the deck, Leese went.
He climbed back up through his tunnel in the trees like an express elevator and nosed the Huey over hard just as the rotor cleared the treetops. A mortar went off below just as our tail cleared the last tree.
Reacher told us that there was not even a little piece of the pilot left, and the air-force commander was finally satisfied. “Not only that,” I fantasized he would write to the widow, “but I sent four suckers from the army right back in there to make sure your husband was dead.”
Leese and I joined our company for the next lift after a trip to the Turkey Farm for refueling.
X-Ray was quiet this time. We dropped off the troopers and picked up wounded. At the hospital tent next to the runway at Holloway, I couldn’t believe how many bodies were piling up outside the tent. Williams radioed that Leese and I and another ship could fly over to our camp and shut down because he wouldn’t need us for the last lift in. I looked at the pile of dead, and shivered.
Back at our camp, Sergeant Bailey leaned out of the operations tent and yelled that the company was on its way back to Holloway. Two pilots had been hit.
Leese and I had been laying back for ten minutes at the Big Top, drinking coffee and enjoying every minute away from the gaggle. As Bailey yelled, I noticed the whole battalion on the horizon coming up from the south. Getting closer, the swarm was so noisy it sounded like a war all by itself. It wasn’t too hard to imagine how the VC kept track of where we were.
The battalion broke into trail formation a few miles south, and the string of Hueys looped around, landing from the west. Leese and I were downwind from the flight line, and a warm, sweet breeze of burning kerosene from the turbines drifted by us.
The Hueys lined up side by side. Engines were shut down, and the pilots jumped out, carrying their gear. The crew chiefs waited patiently to tie the blades down and postflight their machines. As the pilots got closer, we could hear some whooping and yelling in their midst. It wasn’t what we expected to hear after the news of the wounded.
At the Big Top, it was obvious why they were happy. The two wounded pilots, both from the other platoon, were walking with them, grinning and laughing with the rest. The blood from their wounds had dried in their hair and on their faces.
Both men had been hit in the head on the last lift. One had been shot from the front and the other from the side. Both were clutching their helmets, pointing at the holes. One guy had had a bullet hit the visor knob on the forehead portion of his flight helmet. The bullet had crushed his helmet and glanced off. His scalp was bleeding.
The other lucky soul walked around holding his helmet with a finger stuck into the holes on each side of it. Dried blood matted his hair on each side of his head. It was a magician’s illusion. The bullet had to have gone through his head, from what we could see. We wanted to know the trick.
“I figured it out on the way back,” he said. “I mean, after I stopped feeling for the holes on each side of my head and asking Ernie if I was still alive!” He was still pale, but he laughed. “The bullet hit while we were on short final to X-Ray. Luckily, Ernie was flying. It felt like somebody had hit me on the head with a bat. It blurred my vision. First I thought that a bullet had hit me on the helmet and somehow bounced off. Ernie first noticed the blood. He’d turned to tell me about a round going through the canopy in front of him when he saw it.” I could imagine the guy seeing the jagged hole in the side of his friend’s flying helmet, blood dripping down his neck. “I reached up to feel my helmet and felt the hole on the right side, but Ernie said the blood was coming from the other side. I put my left hand up and felt that hole! I pulled both hands down quickly, and they were both bloody! I felt the helmet again. Two holes all right. Two wounds all right. One on each side of my head. I couldn’t believe I was still alive!” He passed the helmet around while he continued his story. “See, it hit here.” He pointed in front of his right ear. “The bullet hit this ridge of bone and deflected up between my scalp and the inside of my helmet. Then”—he shook his head in disbelief—“then it circled around inside the top of the helmet and hit this ridge of bone on my left side.” He pointed.
“It was deflected out here, through the helmet and on through the canopy in front of Ernie!” He beamed. I saw the path the bullet made as it tore its way around through the padding on the inside of the helmet and the two wounds on each side of his head. I shook my head. God again?
As soon as he finished his story, a Jeep drove him and the other pilot across the airstrip to the hospital tent. As I watched them go, I saw the eastern sky fill with a huge formation of helicopters coming from the direction of An Khe. The Cav was sending the 227th to join us. That’s about as near to full strength as the Cav got.
I joined Resler and the rest of the pilots going over to the compound for chow. About a hundred of us walked across the runway, spread out, talking to our buddies under the twilight sky. We passed the hospital tent, where the smell of blood was strong and body bags concealing grotesquely contorted corpses waited in the shadows.
The next morning, Leese and I stayed behind when the company left. We left a half hour later, to go on a single-ship mission before joining them later.
We had an easy mission to an artillery unit. We were supposed to drop off some radios, the mail, and the unit’s commander, who was dropping by to talk shop with his boys. When he was finished, we were to take him back to Pleiku and then join our company.
The grunts were in the middle of a fire mission. Twenty steel barrels grouped on the north side of the clearing pointed eagerly toward the sky in the south. Concussion rings sprang away from the muzzles in the high humidity. The guns rocked back. They were shooting at targets five miles away.
They cleared us to come in, but kept on firing. The landing spot was in front of the guns.
Landing at artillery positions was a thrill. They were always in the middle of a fire mission, and they would keep firing until the ship was just about in front of the first tube. Naturally the final decision about what was too close for comfort was entirely up to the man pulling the lanyard on the cannon. The timing varied a lot. It depended on the mood of the gunner, which in turn depended on whether or not a helicopter had ever blown his tent away.
This was only my second landing into an artillery position. I set up my approach to the clearing in front of the guns and cautiously crept in, constantly reminding them on the radio that I was coming. As I crossed the trees, they were still firing. I glanced at the blasting muzzles on my left and realized that we were beginning to line up on the barrels. They stopped firing. I looked into the black muzzles and watched smoke drift lazily out as I flew through the still-turbulent air in front of them.
Someone decided to resume firing.
I was so close to the guns, looking right down their barrels when they went off, that I thought they had made a mistake and blown us apart. The sound went through me. My chest vibrated. The shock of the explosion rocked the helicopter. I landed and checked the seat. Clean.
The artillery commander told us he’d be about an hour, so I got out and walked around the place.
Twenty 105mm howitzers were grouped together on one side of the circular clearing. They took up about one fourth of the available space, the rest being kept clear for helicopters.
Spent brass casings glittered in the grass. They took these, eventually, to a large cargo net laid out near the middle of the clearing to be carried away by a Chinook when it was full.
I walked around behind the guns to watch the crews work. They were in the middle of a big salvo, going toward X-Ray, and the pace was hectic. The explosions were more than loud; they shook my body and my brains. I stuffed toilet paper in my ears and kept my mouth open. This was supposed to keep your eardrums from bursting.
One man near each gun took a chain of four or five powder bags out of the shell casings and tore off one of them. He threw it into a nearby fire, where it flashed brilliantly. The strength of the charge was controlled by discarding packets not needed for the distance they were shooting. After adjusting the charge, the man put the round—the business end of the package containing high explosives or white phosphorus—onto the open end of the brass casing. Ready to fire, the shell was stacked on a pile near the gun crew.
A hundred shirtless men worked, sweating, in practiced synchronization in the hot, stagnant air of the clearing. I watched them fire round after round in a fifteen-minute barrage that finally ended when the command “Cease fire” was shouted down the line.
When the thunder stopped, the quiet was startling. The men in the crews began clearing away spent casings and rearranging some of the litter around them, but they were clearly interested in the outcome of their efforts. I heard calls of “How’d we do?”
The aerial observer several miles away, at their target, radioed the news. “A hit. Body count over 150.” A few isolated cheers sprang from among the twenty crews. Their sweat-covered backs glistened in the sun as they sat down for a smoke break.
Theirs was an odd war. Working feverishly in tree-walled clearings dotted here and there, away from everyone else, their enemy remained unseen, and the measure of their success or failure was a radio call from an aerial observer counting bodies. The work was hard and the noise was oppressive. During the month-long battle of Ia Drang valley, it went on twenty-four hours a day. Could a man ever really sleep in such cacophony? I tried it once and couldn’t.
I talked to some guys in the crews, and they liked their job, especially as an alternative to being a trooper or a door gunner on a Huey. Their only real danger, aside from their guns blowing up, was being overrun. So far this hadn’t happened in the Cav.
They asked me a lot of questions about what was happening. They could see the big flights of choppers heading south. They were having more fire missions with big body counts. The pace was quickening. They were excited about the idea of trapping the NVA. Maybe, just maybe, the enemy could be surrounded and killed. Maybe after suffering such a defeat, they would give up. We could all go home. It seemed possible. We were winning, weren’t we?
The number of wounded we were carrying was growing fast. That week Leese and I flew more than a hundred wounded to the hospital tent. Other slicks carried a similar number.
When there was room and time, we carried the dead. They had low priority because they were no longer in a hurry. Sometimes they were thrown on board in body bags, but usually not. Without the bags, blood drained on the deck and filled the Huey with a sweet smell, a horribly recognizable smell. It was nothing compared to the smell of men not found for several days. We had never carried so many dead before. We were supposed to be winning now. The NVA were trapped and being pulverized, but the pile of dead beside the hospital tent was growing. Fresh recruits for graves registration arrived faster than they could be processed.
Back at our camp, I was feeling jittery after seeing too much death. I heard that two pilots had got caught on the ground.
Nate and Kaiser had gone to rescue them. Nate was almost in tears as he talked to us in the Big Top. “The stupid assholes. They had been relieved to return for fuel. But you know Paster and Richards: typical gunship pilots. Somehow they think their flex guns make them invulnerable. Anyway, on the flight back they were alone and spotted some VC or NVA or somebody on the ground and decided to attack. Nobody knows how long they were flying around there, because they called after they got hit. When Kaiser and I got there about ten minutes later, the Huey was just sitting there in a clearing looking fine. There were two gunships with us, and they circled around first and took no fire. Kaiser and I went behind the grounded ship. When we landed, I saw a red mass of meat hanging off a tree branch. It turned out to be Paster, hanging by his feet with his skin ripped off. There was nobody else around. The guns kept circling around and a Dust Off landed behind us. I got out, Kaiser stayed with the ship. The medic jumped out and ran with me.” Nate kept patting his breast pockets, looking for his pipe. He never found it. “Paster’s skin hung down in sheets and covered his head. The bastards had even cut off his cock. They must have just started on Richards, because we found him lying half naked about a hundred feet away in t
he elephant grass. His head was almost off.” Nate stopped for a second, looking pale. “I almost threw up. Richards and I went to flight school together. The medics, cut Paster down and stuffed him into a body bag.” He shook his head, holding back tears. “Remember how Richards always bragged about how he knew he’d survive in the jungle if he got shot down? Shit, he even went to jungle school in Panama. If anybody’d be able to get away, it’d be Richards.”
Nate’s story hit hard. I remembered Richards and his jungle-school patch. Big deal, jungle expert. You got a hundred feet on your one big chance to evade the enemy. All that training down the drain. The thought of his wasting all that training brought tears to my eyes.
The pace remained hectic. The next day several assaults were made to smaller LZs near X-Ray to broaden our front against the NVA. Farris was assigned the command ship in a company-size flight, a mix of ships from the Snakes and the Preachers. We were going to a small, three-ship LZ. He picked me to be his pilot.
Everyone was tense. Radio conversations were terse. The grunts in the back looked grim. Even Farris looked worried. The NVA were being surrounded, and we knew they had to fight.
Farris and I would be in the first group of three to land. The company, each ship carrying eight grunts, trailed out behind us.
As the flight leader, Farris had the option to fly from any position in his flight. He chose the second ship. A theory from the developmental days of the air-assault concept said that the flight commander supposedly got a better idea about what was happening from the middle or even the end of the formation. Really big commanders flew high above us, for the best view of all.
I think this was my first time as a command-ship pilot, and I was all for survival. I would’ve been very happy flying the brigade commander up there at 5000 feet, or Westmoreland to his apartment in Saigon. It’s amazing how many places I considered being besides there.
In assaults, we usually started drawing fire at 1000 feet, sometimes at 500. This time we didn’t.