by Robert Mason
“If I hear of any more cowboy stuff by you guys, I‘ll—” He had to stop and think for a minute. What could he do? Ground us? Send us home? What could he do that we wouldn’t like? “Tomorrow is your day off. You two have just volunteered to work on the club.”
Perfect.
Rumor came first, then the news. The 229th was scheduled to go to Bong Son valley. Every recon ship sent to this coastal valley fifty miles north of Qui Nhon had been hit by ground fire. The VC called it their own. A huge joint operation was planned involving the Cav, the marines, the navy, and the ARVNs. The navy would bombard the LZs with heavy guns. The marines would land on the beach north of the valley. The Cav would go into the middle of it and take the place. The ARVNs would mill around somewhere.
One of the recon-ship pilots, a warrant officer from another platoon, walked into the company’s HQ tent and turned in his wings, silver wings he had earned before the Second World War. He put them on the table and said, “Enough.”
“God! What will they do to him?” said Resler.
“I don’t know. Is it legal to just quit?” I asked Connors.
“Got me,” said Connors. “Probably they’ll shoot him or cut off his balls or maybe even make him work on the club.”
The quitter was whisked away. Several weeks later we learned that he was operating an in-country R&R center in Saigon.
It had never occurred to us that we could quit. Technically, we were all volunteers, and if anyone couldn’t take it, he could resign from flight status. But actually to do it… just quit. It was definitely an intelligent thing to do, but so dumb. How would he live with himself?
A few days later we flew farewell assaults in good old Ia Drang again, following up reports from the ARVNs that the NVA was gathering strength near the Cambodian border. About twenty-four ships from our battalion, including one with Nate and me, were sent to poke around.
Sherman rarely led a flight. The aging captain—he was in his early forties—needed some combat-command time before he could make major. He was nervous and cocky at our briefing, the dashing leader of a combat mission to the dreaded Ia Drang. His plan had us flying to Plei Djereng Special Forces camp, near the Cambodian border, then breaking up in groups of four to land grunts at strategic points.
Nate flew on the way out and I played with the maps. It wasn’t necessary to navigate during a formation flight, but I was always curious about just where the fuck I really was. We crossed the Turkey Farm at 2000 feet, heading west-southwest. A half hour later I saw what I thought was the camp five miles off to our left, but Sherman continued straight ahead.
“Getting close to the border,” I said.
“How far?” asked Nate.
“Well, it looks to me like we’re almost on top of it right now.”
“Really?”
“Yellow One, Yellow Two.” Yellow One was Sherman; Yellow Two, Morris and Decker.
“Roger, Yellow Two. Go ahead.”
“Yellow One, I think we’d better turn. Real soon,” Morris drawled.
There was a moment of silence. I could imagine Sherman unfolding and folding and crumpling maps, trying to figure out just what part of this miserable jungle he was over.
“Yellow Two, we’re right on course.”
“Ah, that’s a negative, Yellow One. I’ve got us past our target.”
That was Morris’s way of saying that we were over Cambodia.
Another moment of silence.
“Negative, Yellow Two. I’ve got us on course.”
You could hear the static of Morris’s mike as he hesitated. “Roger.”
Poor Sherman had fucked up and still didn’t know it. His very first authentic combat mission as commander. Kiss major good-bye.
Five miles into the jungle marked “Cambodia” on the map, Sherman’s ship lurched. He veered left, then right, before he actually made the turn. He made no announcement, simply turned back.
“Man, it’s hard to navigate around this fucking jungle, the dumb shit,” Nate said.
The radio was silent until our expeditionary gaggle returned to the proper country. From that day on, poor Sherman would get no command more adventurous or prestigious than being put in charge of digging the company’s well.
As we crossed the border, the chatter began once again. Sherman called Connors and told him he wanted our flight to stay on the ground as a reserve when we landed. Then he told us all to stretch out in trail formation.
The gaggle strung itself out in single file for the landing at Plei Djereng. As the first ships flared, red dust billowed up and swallowed them completely. The Special Forces people had bulldozed a landing strip, and the dry season had turned it to dust.
“Don’t try to hover. Put ‘em straight on the ground,” Sherman radioed. We couldn’t even see the ships that had already landed in the red clouds.
I trailed in behind Connors. When he got within fifty feet of the ground, the dust from the ship in front swallowed him up. He called, “Go around.” He pulled up and headed off to the right. I followed. Ships three and four behind us went on in and landed, and then the rest. By circling around, Connors and I put ourselves on the tail of the line. As we set up for the second try, I drifted back farther from Connors to stay away from his dust. Ten feet off the ground, Connors disappeared. Now it was my turn, the last ship in.
Roots and leafless bushes stuck up wildly at the extreme end of the strip. When I flared, the rotor wash stirred up the dust and everything vanished. I felt the ship hit something. I thought it sounded like a stump coming up through the belly, which happened pretty of ten on the assaults, so I elected to land a few feet farther ahead. Which way was ahead? Which way was up? There were only seconds to figure it out. The compass showed that we were turning to the right. I pushed the left pedal to stop the spin. It didn’t work.
This was a tail-rotor failure. The solution was to chop the power quickly to stop the ship from rotating under the main rotors, and then do a hovering autorotation. We had practiced this routine in flight school. Hundreds of times.
I tried to roll off the throttle to stop the spin, but it was locked. Nate, flying right seat, had locked the throttle for cruising. There was no way to release it from my side. There was no time to discuss the problem with Nate. This whole spinning machine was going to go over and beat itself to death, real soon. So I decided to put it down before it spun too fast. The ship hit and twisted on the skids, rocked over toward the left, hesitated precariously, and flopped back level.
We were out long before the dust settled. It didn’t look too bad. The ship sat crooked on its skids. The tail-rotor gear box was hanging by mechanical tendons. The tail rotor itself was twisted and bent.
Connors came back looking genuinely concerned. “What happened?”
“I’m not sure, but I hit something with my tail rotor.”
Nate and I, Connors and Banjo, and the grief-stricken Reacher poked around the ship looking for a stump or a rock or something big that could have done such damage, but there was nothing obvious. Nate finally called us over to where he squatted.
“A root?” I exclaimed.
“Looks that way,” said Nate. “See, you chopped it off right here.” He pointed to a fresh cut on a scrawny root sticking up through the dust. The cutoff point was two feet off the ground.
“Damn,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it, Mason. You couldn’t have seen it, not in this dust,” said Nate. “I didn’t see it.”
“Yeah, but you weren’t flying.”
“Couldn’t be helped.”
I bitched some more about my rotten luck, but Nate and Connors kept saying it wasn’t my fault.
Reacher came over and said, “It’s okay, Mr. Mason. She’ll be flying again in no time.” I felt better. Reacher was the one to know. It was his ship, the most powerful ship in the company, the ship Leese had used to haul that impossible load. If Reacher thought it wasn’t too bad, then it wasn’t too bad.
Nate and I walked to
the Special Forces HQ hooch to wait for a ride back. Reacher decided to stay with the Huey until a Chinook was sent out to sling-load it home for repairs.
“You guys want a beer?” asked one of the advisers. He wore a camouflage uniform like the Vietnamese Rangers‘, covered with red dust. Red dust collected on everybody’s skin.
“Sure,” said Nate. We weren’t going to be flying any more today, so having a beer was okay.
We sat on a cot under a canvas canopy and sipped our beers while the rest of the gaggle gathered their load of grunts, cranked up, and left. A half hour later, the dust finally settled.
“Well, how do you like it?” asked the adviser.
“The beer?”
“No, this place. Plei Djereng. The asshole of the world.”
“Dusty.”
“Yeah, we keep it that way on purpose. Keeps the shit from stinking.”
A lone Huey courier landed at the camp. Nate and I hitched a ride to Pleiku. We had the pilot call our gaggle en route to tell them where we’d be. Sherman said he’d come fetch us near the end of the day. Camp Holloway at Pleiku was familiar territory. We immediately went to their officers’ club, drank some more beer, and played their slot machines. I still felt bad about breaking the ship. I couldn’t enjoy myself at all. While the rest of the gaggle was out getting shot at, I was acting like a typical adviser, drinking beer, playing slots—jerking off. The whole thing was due to my incompetence; nobody else had hit a root. So I drank more beer than I should have. So did Nate. He suggested that if we had to wait till sunset, we might as well do it downtown. I agreed. We decided that the best way to get there was to walk, and that’s what we started to do. We got a mile down the road when the daylight began to fade.
“Hey, Nate, something’s wrong with my eyes. Everything’s getting dim.” I stopped.
“Yeah. Mine, too.” The sky turned a pale orange, yet the sun was still high.
“Man, every time I drink too early in the day, I get fucked up. Not like this, though,” said Nate.
While we blinked at our dimming world, we saw our gaggle approaching Camp Holloway. The sun got brighter.
“Aha!” I exclaimed. “It’s not the booze; that was an eclipse.”
“Hey, yeah.” Nate grinned. We weren’t going to continue to dim out and fade to nothingness after all.
The sun got bright again, and the gaggle thundered and whopped and hissed to a landing. We ran back to Holloway to rejoin our comrades.
The original damage estimate was $10,000, later raised to $100,000. The accident board decided that the cause was extreme, dusty conditions. They had let me off the hook. The usual verdict was pilot error. I mean, if the rotor blades came off in flight, the pilot was posthumously charged with failure to preflight the ship properly. One time, I saw the rotors of a Huey slash through‘the cockpit and decapitate the two pilots while the ship was on the ground. The pilots were guilty of not checking the ship’s log. The ship had been “red, X’d” by the crew chief while he worked on the control rods. Pilot error. If you skewered a Huey on a sharp stump during an assault, it was pilot error. If you tumbled down the side of a mountain while trying to land on a pinnacle under fire, it was pilot error. There was usually no other conclusion. So the board was generous indeed when it decided that the accident was due to extreme, dusty conditions. But guess what I thought… the pilot was in error.
We’d already taken Happy Valley, but we had to go back out to patch up a few holes in the victory. Somebody forgot to tell Charlie he lost, so he was still out there shooting down helicopters, the dumb fuck.
The news about our victory against the North Vietnamese Regulars at Ia Drang had been so well reported that the Cav was taking on some of the mythical qualities usually afforded the marines. We were the pros.
I knew that the press was doing a selling job when we supported a newly arrived unit from Hawaii. When we landed to pick up the men, they rushed us like kids when they saw we were air crews from the famous Cav. We were celebrities, the vanguard of more units like ours that would squeeze the Communists back up north like so much shit.
In two days we flew twelve assaults into the same areas we had taken several times before. To add insult to injury, the VC fought even harder.
One LZ lay near the thin jungle at the base of the hills. I was flying number-three slot on the left side of the formation. Our squad was the second one to go in. Gunships made their chattering runs beside us, and door gunners killed bushes. Smoke from the prep was billowing skyward, and as we got to within five hundred feet of the ground, red tracers were streaking among us. By now I had learned to concentrate on my job and to suppress my fear. I felt almost brave. This was Happy Valley. I’d been here scores of times before, and it was never as bad as Ia Drang. Besides, I was one of the pros.
The return fire from the invisible Charlies was more intense as we got closer. We continued straight in.
Near the bottom of the approach, maybe a hundred feet off the deck, I saw a steady stream of tracers off to my left. Aiming at somebody else? Who’s behind me? Then the stream began to move in toward my ship. He’s singled us out as his target. He’s got us. Goddamnit, he’s got us.
I could not move from my slot, or even dodge around. I was flying tight on number two, and somebody was flying tight on me. Just keep going. I felt Gary get on the controls. The tracers were close, only a second away from raking the cockpit.
I tightened my stomach, like the bullets might bounce off. My arms tightened; my jaw tightened; my hands tightened. The rounds must not go through me. Of all things, my wristwatch stood vividly before me. How could I see my watch? I wasn’t even looking at it. It was a gold, square-faced Hamilton that my grandfather had left me. The second hand had its own dial at the bottom of the face. And the hand was not moving. At that moment, I could have unbuckled, opened the door, walked around outside, had a smoke, and watched the flight frozen in the midst of the assault. I would be able to walk between the tracers and use one to light my cigarette. I saw the flight frozen there in midair. I saw myself braced for the impact of that shredding fire. It was almost funny.
An explosive whoosh beside the cockpit caused the clock to run again. Smoking rockets followed the tracers to their source. They stopped, just like that. A Duke gunship had nailed that fucker with a rocket right down the stream of fire. I was saved.
There was a lot more fire on the ground when we landed, but it was impotent. It didn’t matter: I was saved.
Back at the Golf Course, they told us that our first assault into Bong Son was set for the next morning.
The first assault would be to LZ Dog, to secure a base of operations for the grunts. The navy had blasted Dog, the army had artilleried Dog, the marines were landing on the beach ten miles away, and the Cav was sending a hundred slicks in to take the place.
A flight of a hundred helicopters becomes a train of unconnected parts that bunches up and stretches out like the flow of commuter traffic. One minute you’re trying to close a gap between yourself and the flight ahead, and the next second you’re practically hovering to keep away.
The villages we saw before we got to LZ Dog were islands in the sea of rice paddies. This was one of the most valuable of all Vietnamese valleys because of its bountiful rice crop. The people who lived here were sympathetic to Uncle Ho, as was 80 percent of the rest of Vietnam. The other 20 percent, in the American-controlled cities, was engaged in maintaining the colonialist system installed by the French and now run by the Americans. I knew this because Wendall had told me. He said, “Just read Street WithoutJoy and you’ll see.” But there weren’t any copies of that book around here, and it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway, because I just didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it, because Kennedy and McNamara and Johnson and all the rest certainly knew about Street Without Joy, and they sent us here anyway. It was obvious to me that Bernard Fall was just another flake, the father of the dreaded Vietniks who were attacking our country like so much cancer. And of
course the proof of all this was that Wendall himself was still here doing everything I was doing. And even Wendall wasn’t that dumb.
“Yellow One, you are off course.”
No answer.
“Yellow One, turn left twenty degrees.”
Yellow One, the lead ship of this monstrous gaggle, still didn’t answer. Instead he slowed down even more and turned farther away from our course. Nate and I (Resler was away on R&R) were way back in the flight, the fortieth ship or so. We were showing an airspeed of 20 knots. The whole gaggle was staggering and bunching up over some villages at an altitude of 100 feet.
“Yellow One, do you read?”
No answer.
“Yellow Two, take the lead. Come left forty degrees.”
“Roger.”
We had a leader again. Yellow One’s radios were shot out, and he had been trying to hand-signal Yellow Two to take over, but Yellow Two just followed him as he tried to break away.
Below us, the villagers were having a picnic, shooting at a lot of helicopters flying low and slow. At one village I saw fifty people just standing around, their hands shielding their eyes from the sun, watching the show. Somebody down there was shooting, because the ships were calling in hits. I couldn’t see any guns, just women and children and men watching the helicopter parade.
As the gaggle crossed the next village on our flight path, many ships called in hits. Connors got his fuel bladder raked and had to break away from the flight. Another ship called in that a pilot was killed, and it turned back. Someone in that village was doing a real job, but so far he was invisible. Meanwhile, we still wallowed around, flying low and slow.
One of the ships just ahead of us called in hit. At the same moment, I saw where the gun was. Among all the people, water buffalo, thatched huts, and coconut trees, an innocent-looking group of people stood bunched in a crowd. From the center of the crowd I saw smoke and then the gunner. He had a machine gun.