by Robert Mason
At 500 feet, on a glide path to the clearing, smoke from the just completed prestrike by our artillery and gunships drifted straight up in the still air. There had to be one time when the prep actually worked and everybody was killed in the LZ. I hoped this might be it.
Fighting my feeling of dread, I went through the automatic routine of checking the smoke drift for wind direction. None. We approached from the east, three ships lined up in a trail, to land in the skinny LZ. But it was too quiet!
At 100 feet above the trees, closing on the near end of the LZ, the door gunners in Yellow One started firing. They shot into the trees at the edge of the clearing, into bushes, anywhere they suspected the enemy was hiding. There was no return fire. The two gunships on each side of our flight opened up with their flex guns. Smoke poured out of them as they crackled. My ears rang with the loud but muffled popping as my door gunners joined in with the rest. I ached to have my own trigger. With so many bullets tearing into the LZ, it was hard to believe anyone on the ground could survive.
The gunships had to stop firing as we flared close to the ground because we could be hit by ricocheting bullets. Still no return fire. Maybe they were all dead! Could this be the wrong spot?
My adrenaline was high, and I was keenly aware of every movement of the ship. I waited for the lurch of dismounting troopers as the skids neared the ground. They were growling and yelling behind me, psyched for battle. I could hear them yelling above all the noise. I still can.
My landing was synchronized with the lead ship, and as our skids hit the ground, so did the boots of the growling troops.
At the same instant, the uniformed regulars from the North decided to spring their trap. From at least three different directions, they opened up on our three ships and the off-loading grunts with machine-gun crossfire. The LZ was suddenly alive with their screaming bullets. I tensed on the controls, involuntarily leaning forward, ready to take off. I had to fight the logical reaction to leave immediately. I was light on the skids, the troops were out. Let’s go! Farris yelled on the radio for Yellow One to go. They didn’t move.
The grunts weren’t even making it to the trees. They had leapt out, screaming murderously, but now they dropped all around us, dying and dead. The lead ship’s rotors still turned, but the men inside did not answer. I saw the sand spurt up in front of me as bullets tore into the ground. My stomach tightened to stop them. Our door gunners were firing over the prone grunts at phantoms in the trees.
A strange quietness happened in my head. The scene around me seemed far away. With the noise of the guns, the cries of the gunners about everybody being dead, and Farris calling for Yellow One to go, I thought about bullets coming through the Plexiglas, through my bones and guts and through the ship and never stopping. A voice echoed in the silence. It was Farris yelling “Go! Go! Go!”
I reacted so fast that our Huey snapped off the ground. My adrenaline seemed to power the ship as I nosed over hard to get moving fast. I veered to the right of the deadly quiet lead ship, still sitting there. The door gunners fired continuously out both sides. The tracers coming at me now seemed as thick as raindrops. How could they miss? As a boy I made a game of dodging raindrops in the summer showers. I always got hit eventually. But not this time. I slipped over the treetops and stayed low for cover, accelerating. I veered left and right fast, dodging, confounding, like Leese had taught me, and when I was far enough away, I swooped up and away from the nightmare. My mind came back, and so did the sound.
“What happened to Yellow Three?” a voice said. It was still on the ground.
The radios had gone wild. I finally noticed Farris’s voice saying, “Negative, White One. Veer left. Circle back.” Farris had White One lead the rest of the company into an orbit a couple of miles away. Yellow One and Yellow Three were still in the LZ.
I looked down at the two ships sitting quietly on the ground. Their rotors were turning lazily as their turbines idled. The machines didn’t care, only the delicate protoplasm inside them cared. Bodies littered the clearing, but some of the thirty grunts we had brought in were still alive. They had made it to cover at the edge of the clearing.
Farris had his hands full. He had twelve more ships to get in and unloaded. Then the pilot of Yellow Three called. He was still alive, but he thought his partner was dead. His crew chief and gunner looked dead, too. He could still fly.
Two gunships immediately dove down to escort him out, machine guns blazing. It was a wonderful sight to see from a distance.
Only Yellow One remained on the ground. She sat, radios quiet, still running. There was room behind her to bring in the rest of the assault.
A grunt who found himself still alive got to a radio. He said that he and a few others could keep some cover fire going for the second wave.
Minutes later, the second group of three ships was on its way in, and Farris told me to return to the staging area. I flew back a couple of miles to a big field, where I landed and picked up another load of wild-eyed boys.
They also growled and yelled. This was more than just the result of training. They were motivated. We all thought that this was the big push that might end it all. By the time I made a second landing to the LZ, the enemy machine guns were silent. This load would at least live past the landing.
Somebody finally shut down Yellow One’s turbine when we left. Nobody in the crew could. They were all patiently waiting to be put into body bags for the trip home.
Why I didn’t get hit I’ll never know. I must have read the signs right. Right? They started calling me “Lucky” after that mission.
That afternoon, while the sunset glowed orange behind Pleiku in the distance, Leese and I and some others walked over to the hospital tent.
We came to see the bodies. A small crowd of living stood watching the growing crowd of dead. Organization prevailed. Bodies on this pile. Loose parts here. Presumably the spare arms and legs and heads would be reunited with their owners when they were pushed into the bags. But graves registration had run out of body bags, and the corpses were stacked without them.
New arrivals, wounded as well as dead, were brought over from the helicopters. A medic stood in the doorway of the operating tent diverting some of the stretchers away. Some cases were too far gone. Bellies blown open. Medics injected morphine into them. But morphine couldn’t change the facts. I stared at one of the doomed men, fifty feet away. He saw me, and I knew that he knew. His frightened eyes widened, straining to live. He died. After a few minutes somebody came by and closed his eyes.
A new gunner, a black kid who had until recently been a grunt, had come over with me and Leese. We stayed back, but he had gone closer to the pile of bodies just to look. He started wailing and crying and pulling at the corpses and had to be dragged away. He had seen his brother at the bottom of the heap.
Two days later there was a lull in the fighting, at least as far as our company was concerned. We were given the day off. You could hear a collective sigh of relief. Compared to Happy Valley, this was action, and living through a year of it seemed unlikely.
What do you do on your first day off after weeks of action when you’re feeling tired, depressed, and doomed on a hot, wet day at Camp Holloway, Vietnam? You get in a deuce-and-a-half and go into Pleiku and drink your brains out. That’s what you do.
I rode in with Leese and Riker, Kaiser and Nate, Connors and Banjo, and Resler. I remember drinking beer all afternoon—effective because I usually didn’t drink—first at one bar and then another. They all blended into one. Though I had started with Resler as my companion, I somehow found myself with Kaiser at a table in the Vietnamese officers’ club that night.
“We see Americans as being apelike, big and clumsy with hairy arms,” a Vietnamese lieutenant was saying to Kaiser. “Also, you all smell bad, like greasy meat.”
Kaiser had got into a conversation with a racist of the opposite race. I watched the two men hate each other while I drank the genuine American bourbon that the Vietnamese lieut
enant had so kindly bought us.
“Of course, you won’t be offended if I continue?” asked the lieutenant.
“Naw,” said Kaiser, squinting. “It’s okay. I don’t give a fuck what a slope thinks anyway.” He belted down another shot.
The two men continued to trade heartfelt insults, the gist of which revealed normally submersed beliefs. Kaiser disclosed the widespread resentment among the Americans that the ARVN units apparently would not or could not fight their own battles. The lieutenant demonstrated that the ARVN resented being rescued by such oafish, unjustifiably wealthy gorillas who were taking over everything in their country, including their women.
After an hour of drinking and insults, Kaiser ended our stay by telling the old “pull the plug” joke to the lieutenant. That was the cynical solution to differentiating between friend and foe in Vietnam and ending the war. The joke had us putting all the “friendlies” on boats in the ocean where they would wait while the remaining people, the enemy, were killed. Then, as the punch line went, we would pull the plug, sink the ships.
Kaiser seemed almost surprised that the lieutenant didn’t laugh. Instead the insulted man got up and left. Soon, looks from the other Vietnamese officers told us we weren’t welcome. We left to continue our party an another bar.
Somehow we missed the truck back to camp. We went back to the officers’ club and borrowed one of their Jeeps. We didn’t tell them we were borrowing it; it was made in America, after all. When the Jeep was found the next day, parked in the Camp Holloway motor pool, it caused a stink. No one knew who it was who took it, but Farris looked awfully suspicious when it was reported at the morning briefing. He had noticed that we had come back by ourselves.
“Pretty slick, guys,” he said after the briefing.
“Hey, Captain Farris, not us!” Kaiser looked sincere. “It was an inside job.”
“Inside job?”
“That’s right, sir. Those little guys will do anything to discredit us Americans. You should have heard the stupid things they said about us last night. ‘Hairy apes. Greasy meat. Stupid.’ No, sir, it doesn’t surprise me a bit, knowing how they really feel about us.”
“Right.” Farris sighed. “Well, Mr. Kaiser, from now on, whenever you get a chance to party it up in town, I’ll be keeping you company.”
“Captain?” Kaiser looked at Farris, distressed.
“What if you guys had been stopped at the gate? Two warrant officers. You need a captain along to keep you out of trouble. Besides, I don’t want to ride around in a deuce-and-a-half when I know you guys can get a Jeep.”
Normally, the Cav carried only its own troopers, but we hauled ARVNs one day. I had heard stories about their unwillingness to fight.
“When you land at the LZ, make sure your door gunners cover the departing ARVNs,” Williams said at the briefing. “There have been several incidents of so-called ARVNs turning around and firing into the helicopter that just dropped them off. Also, you may have a few on your ship that don’t want to get out. If this happens, have one gunner force them out. The other gunner should be covering him. If your gunner has to shoot, make sure he knows to stop shooting when he gets the one who made the wrong move. A wrong move is turning around with a rifle pointed at you. We’re flying this one lift today as a favor. We won’t be doing it again.” Williams gave his flock a paternal look. “Keep your eyes open.”
I was amazed. This was the first time I had heard the rumors verified. In the months to come, I would hear as much about being wary with the ARVNs as I did about the Cong. If neither was to be trusted, who were our allies ? Whose war was this, anyway? The people who had the most at stake wouldn’t get out of the choppers to fight?
But we lifted the South Vietnamese without incident this time. We flew them to a big LZ from which they were supposed to patrol the newly liberated Ia Drang valley and maintain the status quo of allied dominance. Within twenty-four hours they were pinned down by the VC. In two months we would return to retake the valley.
While we waited for a couple of hours to load the ARVNs, I saw a body lying in the field when we landed at the pickup zone next to Holloway. A piece of rope still cinched his neck.
I walked back and asked Resler, “What’s the story on that guy?”
“He’s a Chinese adviser,” Gary said. “The same one we gave to the ARVNs yesterday for questioning.” He looked toward the body. “You see him up close yet?”
“No.”
“Well, he must have answered one of their questions wrong, because they took a chunk out of the side of his head as big as your fist.” He grimaced. “His brains are leaking out. Want to go see him?”
“No. I’ve seen enough brains to last me.”
“Hey, look at those guys.” Gary pointed toward the body, about two hundred feet away. Two soldiers from the adviser compound were setting up a pose for a photograph. One man knelt on one knee behind the body while his friend moved around looking for the best angle for a snapshot. He took a few shots, but apparently the pose wasn’t lively enough for him. He had his friend grab the dead man by the hair and raise the gory head off the ground, brains dripping. He posed like a man holding a dead gazelle.
With the ARVN in place, the Cav’s mission was done. We only killed people; we did not take land. Such was the war of attrition.
By November 26, America had won its first large-scale encounter with the North Vietnamese army. The Cav and the B-52s killed 1800 Communists. The NVA killed more than 300 GIs. The Ia Drang valley campaign was one of the few battles in which I saw clearings filled with NVA bodies. In all, I might have seen a thousand of their corpses sprawled in the sun, rotting. We left them there.
The Cav waited a few days before looking for its missing. That gave the bodies time to get ripe enough for the patrols we lifted out to find them. It was the only way a dead man could be found in the tall elephant grass.
They did not growl now. Stacked on the cargo deck, they still fought, frozen inside their rubber bags, arms and legs stiffly askew. The smell of death seeped out of the zippered pouches and made the living retch. No matter how fast I flew, the smell would not blow away.
“We cut the enemy’s throat instead of just jabbing away at his stomach. This is just the beginning,” said one of our generals in Life magazine.
During the few days we hung around Pleiku before returning to An Khe, I spent most of my time with a couple of kids. I met them on one of my first visits to Pleiku. They were part of the mob who begged for candy and advertised their sisters to the GIs. What stood out about the older of the two brothers was his maturity at the age of nine. When the other kids became very aggressive, I would see Lang off to the side with a disapproving look on his face. He seemed to think that the others were too rowdy, too greedy.
Eventually, when the candy was gone and all the sisters were sold, the others would leave. I would be alone or with Resler, and Lang would come forward, smiling. He liked to hunker down and talk. We squatted in the street and talked of our two worlds in pidgin English and with gestures. He wore a black cotton shirt, tan shorts, and no shoes. He was missing two front teeth, and his hair was cut short in a burr.
Somehow Lang always knew when I would be coming to town. He said he knew, and pointed to his head. I think he spent most of his time waiting, if not for me, then for someone. He always ran to greet me as I walked up the street.
One night when Lang introduced me to a dejected-looking child, younger than he, whom he called brother, I couldn’t stand it anymore and I took them both to a small store and bought them new shoes and shirts. The people in the shop were impressed. Their faces warmed with expressions of approval.
The next stop was a restaurant where I bought them each a steak dinner. Lang sipped some of my beer and leaned back in his chair, looking proud, as if he owned the place. His brother was very shy, and I never knew him as well.
I spent my last two days with them. By our talks and my asking other people I met, I determined that they were orph
ans. Where they slept no one knew. With gestures, guesses, and nods we politely discussed how their parents would be back to get them (from where they did not know) and would surely thank me for having befriended and provided for their children. Then we toured the city. As they were always hungry, our first trip was to the restaurant, then a long walk past scores of new shops to the public square, where the loudspeakers blared with news from the government.
The night before my return to An Khe, they knew about it without my saying anything. They knew it was ending, and they cried. My last look at them was from the back of a truck as I pulled away. They stood under a streetlight and waved and cried miserably. The light grew distant as we bounced back to the Turkey Farm. The darkness hid my tears, but no one watched anyway.
II. SWAVE AND DEBONER
A soaking wet Connors pushed open the flap and slogged inside. The rain beat furiously outside. He looked at the mud floor. “I am a swave and deboner army aviator,” he said.
“The word is suave,” I said.
“Not over here it ain’t.”
6. The Holidays
Vietnam is like the Alamo.
—Lyndon Johnson, December 3, 1965
December 1965
When we got back from Ia Drang, the rats had torn up our packages of food and left in their stead little piles of rat turds artfully lined up along every surface in the mildewed tent. The smell was tangible, but it was home. And no pilots in our company had been killed, an occasion for thanksgiving.
Our first week back, we installed the floor and bought chairs, rice mats, and other stuff to shape up the tent. I even hooked up the lights.
A week later, the Colonel called the battalion officers to a muddy spot between us and the Snakes. He stood, bony arms folded against his chest, looking first at the unruly formation, then at the ground, as if there should be a box or something for him to stand on.