by Robert Mason
“Not without Mary.”
“Gary, be reasonable.”
“Hey, guys, it’s your turn.” Wendall ducked into the tent. The palm-tree isle, the bronze nubiles, popped out of existence. “The crew chief is patching some holes, but the ship will be flyable in just a minute.” Wendall looked kind of pale. “The old man wants you to join the gaggle at Lima. They’ve got some more missions to fly today. I hope it’s better for you guys.”
The crew chief, along with the maintenance officer, had inspected the ship. The holes in the tail boom were a concern because the bullets could have gone through the tail-rotor drive tube or the control cables. They had not. The crew chief covered the holes with green tape that almost matched the olive-drab skin. It was now our ship.
The sky, as if on cue, was overcast. At the An Khe pass Gary had to drop to within fifty feet of the road to maintain visibility. We landed at Lima.
“What’s that all about on the road?” I asked Connors. As we circled Lima on our approach, we had noticed a crowd of men around a big pile of something covered with canvas next to an overturned mule.
“A grunt mule driver lost control and flipped over.”
“Was he hurt?”
“No. Killed.”
“You and Resler are Red Four,” said Leese. He hurried back toward the front of the gaggle. Lima was crawling with activity. Troopers moved around in small groups, looking for their assigned ships. A few Hueys were out over sling loads, hitching up. A Chinook made an approach slinging in a fat black fuel bladder from the Golf Course.
“Shall I put my men on board, sir?” a Cav sergeant asked me.
“Yeah, Sergeant. Let them get on.” I looked forward at the other squads moving toward their ships. “We’re leaving pretty soon.”
He turned. “Move it!” They were in place in about fifteen seconds, I think.
It was a monster gaggle—forty or more ships—the kind I hated the most. And we were flying the four position again. We would have to fly hard to keep up with an outside turn, and flare like hell when the gaggle turned our way. Plus, the ship was a dog. When we took off, she hung down in the turbulence of the choppers in front of us, straining her poor guts out. We caught up to the gaggle at mission altitude and watched the prep going on. Smoke trailed in long streamers drifting off to the west. Air-force jockeys streaked away back to their base, their job done. Our gunships worked the area with their rockets and flex guns. Gary flew, so I just watched the show and smoked a cigarette. Kinda like being at a movie. The grunts behind me were screaming at each other over the cacophony of the ship, smiling, laughing, smoking cigarettes, scared out of their brains. The ships in the gaggle rose and fell on the sea of air. Formations always looked sloppy when you were in them because no two ships were ever at the same altitude. From the ground you got a flat view of the V, and it looked better. One of the noises on the radio was the Colonel.
“Yellow Four. Pull in closer. You call that a formation ?” The Colonel was flying above us, being a colonel. There’s a reason why they do that, we said. It’s from the word itself: colon(el), or asshole. They do exactly what you would expect them to.
“Guns ready?” Gary asked. We were now dropping fast, having crossed the initial point, a meager hut near a tall hedgerow that marked the beginning of the final leg of the assault. The LZ was two miles away.
“Ready.”
“Ready.”
“Fire at my order only, unless you see something obvious. Don’t shoot into the huts.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes, sir.”
Can’t fire into the huts. If you fired into the huts, you might kill a VC.
As we swooped toward the ground for the low-level run, I put my hand gently on the cyclic; my feet rode the pedals; my left hand touched the collective.
“Flare.”
Fifty feet off the ground, Gary was doing well. He flipped the tail past a few trees just when I thought he’d hit them. The gaggle mushed and bounded into the LZ. The troopers leapt out firing.
“Yellow One, it’s too hot ahead of you. Recommend you pedal-turn and go back out the way you came.” That was one of the Dukes, the gunships making runs at something at the far end of the LZ. The guys up front were yelling that there was a lot of shooting going on, but I couldn’t see any back our way.
“Roger. Flight, we’re going out the way we came. Wait your turn.” The flight leader lifted to a high hover and turned to fly back over us. Each ship in its turn leapt up and flew back over us. By the time it was our turn, the first ships were already calling in hit reports. As we joined up, the ship ahead of us was hit, showering bits of Plexiglas back on us. Next I heard tick-tick-tick, and new bullet holes appeared in the Plexiglas over our heads. Gary pulled full power trying to get higher, but the ship was a dog even when empty, so we lagged behind the others. Tick. Somewhere in the air frame.
At 1000 feet or so I lit a cigarette and contemplated the new holes. Bad place for ‘em. It’ll leak if it rains.
We didn’t make it back to Lima. We were pulled out with the other three ships in the Red flight for a couple of emergency extractions. Gary and I followed Farris and Kaiser in Red Three to get some wounded out of a hot LZ. The other two ships went somewhere else.
Farris orbited a couple of times to make sure there was no firing going on. We were supposed to wait until the grunts secured the LZ.
“All clear, Red Three.” I heard gunshots in the background as the trooper talked on the radio to Farris. Farris did, too.
“You’re sure?”
“Affirmative, Red Three. You’re clear to land.” Of course, he was lying. I would’ve lied, too, in the same position.
As we made our approach, Farris took the spot I was headed for, so I had to fly a hundred feet past him. I landed in a grassy spot in front of a hedgerow. I saw troopers low-crawling all over the place.
“Secure, my ass,” said Gary.
Two bent-over men ran toward us carrying a stretcher. Sand sprayed out of the grass near them, and they went down. The body in the litter shifted like a doll.
“Fire from the front,” I radioed to Farris.
The stretcher bearers got back up and made it to the side door, where the crew chief quickly jumped out and grabbed one end of the litter and shoved it across the deck. Another few rounds hit the dirt in front of us. I looked at the radio antenna of the grunt leader swinging around behind the hedgerow. “Fucking liar.”
Another litter had been hauled to our other door, and the gunner was out helping. We were locked to the ground. Farris called that he was leaving. “Come on! Come on!” I yelled back between the seats. Two walking wounded rolled on board. The grunt leader stood up for a second and then hit the dirt. All I heard was the whine of our turbine. No shots. Just little puffs of sand in the short grass. At the hedgerow, a man held a thumbs-up. He pointed to a man at his knees and shook his head. For the first time, I noticed the body. Of course it was a body. Strands of intestines had followed the bullets out of his guts and were lying across his abdomen. He could wait a little longer.
I was up. Pedal-turn. Nose down. Tick. Go. Tick. Climb.
The four wounded lived.
We spent a rainy night back at good old Lima. The new bullet holes leaked.
There was a Christmas truce, but we flew anyway, taking patrols out to check on reported VC violations in our territory. I couldn’t get over how bizarre it was. We could decide to stop killing each other for a few days and then start again. I was still young then.
Actually, the reason I was out on Christmas was that I had fucked up a few days before on a flight with Captain Gillette, our supply officer. He and I were the lead ship in a gaggle of forty-plus ships operating in the hills. On the flight back, I became very aware that there were all these helicopters following me. I had never led a big gaggle before.
All I had to do was bring the gaggle back to the refueling area where the Vietnamese worker had died of snakebite. The lead ship had to fly smoo
thly—no quick turns, gradual descents. But as I started to slow down for the approach, I was too careful. I kept thinking that they would all ram me. I slowed too late, with the result that I overflew the approach. I missed the whole fucking field! Gillette turned to me in awe. There were rumors around that I was a pretty good pilot, and look—Mason missed the entire field, in a helicopter! I had visions of the whole gaggle laughing behind me as I flew past and set up to return. But it was worse. When I made the turn, I saw that all the others had gone ahead and landed while their leader flew off to La-La Land. I flew back to the field flushed with embarrassment. How would I ever live this down?
So on Christmas Day I found myself flying with Farris. He didn’t say as much, but he was checking me out to see why I had fucked up. I was the lead-ship pilot again, but I had spent so much time worrying and thinking about my mistake that I made perfect approaches. I picked the right spots. I allowed enough room for the gaggle to land. My landings, takeoffs, everything, went just fine.
“Gillette said you were having a little trouble with your approaches,” Farris said tactfully.
“That one time, I did.”
“I can see that. You did just fine today.”
“Thanks.”
“Merry Christmas.”
That evening, after we delivered Christmas dinners to all the patrols, we had our own turkey meal. Later we sang a couple of carols, ate some of the goodies sent by the wives and families, and I, for one, shed a few tears when I went to bed.
“I don’t believe it,” Gary Resler said, crouching by his bunk. Heavy gunfire sounded outside our GP. “Why?”
I shook my head in the darkness. “Madness.” A machine gun blasted just outside the tent. I forced my ass farther under the cot, up against the cross braces. I closed my eyes, trying to make the chaos outside a dream. The blast of the machine gun lost itself in the roll of hundreds of other exploding weapons. I was hiding from the madness.
A shadow ran down the aisle, thumping a loose board under my head. Pistol shots rang out inside the tent; then the shadow was gone.
The firing continued. Riker was inside with Gary and me. The others were outside in the trench—safer, maybe. The cot wasn’t going to stop bullets, but I felt safer lying on the floor in the darkness.
“Maybe we should go outside,” Gary called from the corner of his area.
“We tried that, remember?” A staccato blast sounded from just beyond the canvas wall. “They won’t stop!” I shouted. The madness roared like a storm. I guess I won’t forget New Year’s Eve, 1965, I thought.
In a lull, Gary said, “I think it’s dying down. I’m going outside.”
“You’ll be back.” He didn’t hear me. I felt the boards creak as he got up and left. He was back in five minutes.
I felt someone thudding along our aisle again. “Mason, Resler. You guys here?” It was Captain Farris.
“Yeah,” I said from down on the floor.
“Well, get out there and stop them. Stop them.”
“We tried.”
“Well, try again. Let’s go.” He ducked out through the flap.
“I don’t believe this shit,” I heard myself say.
“C‘mon, let’s go,” said Gary.
Under the tracer-streaked sky a spec-five held an M-60 machine gun at his hip, blasting away. The light was dim, but that demonic face was clear.
“Stop that!” I shouted. “Put that gun away!”
The spec-five shook his head and smiled ominously. He watched his tracers stream into the sky toward Hong Kong Hill. God, I thought, there are people on top of that hill, lots of them.
It had started with people shooting into the sky for New Year’s Eve. Now it was totally out of control, and bullets were going toward the radio-relay team on top of the hill. Suddenly tracers came back from the top. The relay team was firing back down into the division.
The Colonel was a spider scurrying and dodging from sandbag pile to ditch to tent, encountering his men gone mad. Fifty feet away from us, he stopped and screamed at a man firing a machine gun. “Stop! I order you to stop!” The man paused, with an irritated look on his face. His battalion commander was becoming a nuisance. He smiled menacingly and swung the hip-held M-60 toward the Colonel, aiming it carefully at his chest. The Colonel shrank back. He turned momentarily to look at Gary and me.
“Do something,” he said, glaring at us.
“What?” We shrugged. He bent over and dodged back toward his tent.
It was quiet at last. At twelve-thirty or so, the battle of Hong Kong Hill stopped. Planes that had had to orbit since the beginning of the melee could now land. The shooting had stopped, and the men had put the guns away. It was still New Year‘s, but it was now very quiet.
“Some people were killed at the maintenance depot,” said Connors.
We all sat quietly on our cots, lights on, as if nothing had happened.
“How many?” somebody asked.
“Seven, I think. There’s some wounded, too.” He spoke without emphasis and stared at the floor. “Hell of a party, huh?”
They shouldn’t allow holidays in a war.
7. The Rifle Range
The verdict on the First Cavalry concept was in last week. Stepping out of an olive-drab tent at An Khe, after an hour-long briefing on the division, Secretary McNamara was brimming over with praise. The division, he said, was “unique in the history of the American Army…. There is no other division in the world like it.”
—Newsweek, December 13, 1965
January 1966
Not long after Resler and I talked of disappearing with a Huey, a ship from the Snakes, tail number 808, took off on a foggy morning to go out to Lima with C rations and supplies, and never arrived.
The pilots called once before crossing the pass to say that the visibility was almost zero, but they could make it. By 0900 I was involved in the search. By dusk they had not been found, not even a clue.
“Do you think they did it?” Resler asked.
“Nah. It was a stupid idea.”
The next day, half a dozen ships from the battalion combed the jungles for miles around the pass looking for signs. Nothing.
The First Cav—the helicopter division—lost one of their own Hueys in their own back yard. It was bad for pilot morale.
Meanwhile, supply sergeants throughout the battalion were keeping their fingers crossed. This was a rare opportunity to balance the property books—once and for all.
Let me explain. In the army, specific amounts of military equipment were allocated to the company supply sections. Once or twice a year, the inspectors general, agents from the brass, came through to check that all property was in the supply depot or properly accounted for. If it wasn‘t, mountains of paperwork had to be done, including explanations by the commander and the supply officer. Searches were made. That was the formal army system.
The informal army supply system worked around such rules. The supply officers simply traded excesses back and forth to cover their asses, and the IGs never knew. Unless, of course, they had once been supply officers. The informal system made the books look good and protected the supply people, but we still had no jungle boots or chest protectors. Certain things you had to get for yourself. I was able to trade a grunt supply sergeant some whiskey for a pair of jungle boots. The chest protectors, though, were still not available. There were only a handful of them in the battalion.
All supply people dreamed of a way to balance the books—once and for all—without all that trading and shuffling. Flight 808 looked like the answer.
After two more days of searching, a Huey was found. It was the wreckage of a courier ship that had disappeared on its way to Pleiku a year before. The search was abandoned, and flight 808 was declared lost.
Declaring the ship missing started paper gears working all over the battalion. One of the questions the supply people loved to hear was “Did you have anything aboard the missing helicopter?”
“Well, now that you
mention it, I did have six entrenching tools on that ship. Plus some web belts—seven web belts, to be exact—three insulated food containers, four first-aid kits, twenty-four flashlights,” and so on.
When all the reports were tallied, I was told by Captain Gillette, it came to a total of five tons of assorted army gear—about five times what we normally carried.
“One hell of a helicopter, don‘cha think?” said Gillette.
“Maybe that’s why it went down,” Gary said. “Slightly overloaded. By eight thousand pounds, I’d say.”
“Yep. We’ll never see another like that one.”
The action in Happy Valley slowed to nothing again. The brass took this to mean that we had won. Won what? A higher body count score, for one thing. And we did dominate the skies. Wendall believed that the Communists had decided to stop fighting temporarily, like they’d often done with the French. Instead of picking up a gun that morning, Charlie went out into the rice paddies and worked. We didn’t believe this. We thought the murderous hordes were beaten and whimpering out in the jungles, licking their wounds. But Wendall said they were with the villagers. Because they were the villagers.
Back around Christmas, a group of Montagnard mercenaries had revolted and killed more than twenty ARVN officers at the Mang Yang pass. After that the Cav guarded Mang Yang pass and the bridges on Route 19 going to Pleiku. The American patrols had their HQs next to the road. We delivered hot food, clothing, mail, and ammunition to them every day. Four or five ships from our company did the resupplying. Resler and I flew one of those ships, logging six and eight hours daily.
It was difficult to adjust to peaceful times. The deaths, the close calls, and the generally hectic pace of the past few weeks had established a combative mind-set and an expectation of continued action. Just going out to resupply some patrols on a secure road was so bland that we played games to make it interesting. Resler and I took turns flying low level down the road, seeing who could hold the ship in the turns. We also buzzed a convoy. MPs in the convoy thought we were maniacs and radioed our battalion. Farris was waiting for us when we got back that night. He said we had really scared the MPs.