by Robert Mason
Before I got into the army, they had asked me a question they asked all prospective grunts: What would you do if you were the driver of a truck loaded with soldiers, traveling very fast down a muddy road, flanked on both sides with steep drop-offs, and a small child suddenly walked into your path? Would you try to avoid her and drive off to certain death, or would you keep going and kill her? Well, everybody knew the right answer: You kill the kid. And it didn’t much matter, because the kid and the situation weren’t real anyway. So I had said, “I’d stop the truck.”
“No, no. You can’t stop the truck. It’s going too fast.”
“Well, then, I wouldn’t be going so fast down a very bad road in the first place.”
“You don’t seem to understand. It’s assumed that you have no choice but to kill either the little kid or you and your comrades.”
“Since I have no choice, I’ll go ahead and kill the kid.”
“That’s what we like to hear.”
Now the question was, How do you kill that gunner, who has just killed some pilots, without killing the screen of innocent people around him?
“I see the gun, sir!” said Rubenski, the door gunner.
“Shoot at the ground first. Scare those people away,” I said.
“Yes, sir.” Rubenski, one of our most accurate gunners, opened up as we drew closer to the gun position. The spectators were at the edge of their village, directly off our right side, a hundred yards away.
The bullets sent up muddy geysers from the paddy water as they raged toward the group. The VC gunner was concentrating on another ship and didn’t see Rubenski’s bullets yet. I really expected to see the black pajamas, conical hats, and the small children scatter and expose the gunner. Were they chained in place? When the bullets were smashing fifty feet in front of them, I knew they weren’t going to move. They threw up their arms as they were hit, and whirled to the ground. After what seemed a very long time, the gunner, still firing, was exposed. Rubenski kept firing. The VC’s gun barrel flopped down on its mount and he slid to the ground. A dozen people lay like tenpins around him. The truck had smashed the kid.
Twenty ships were damaged and five were shot down, killing two pilots and two gunners, while we floundered over the villages on the way to Dog. Dog itself was an ancient Vietnamese graveyard, and we took it without too much trouble. The ships landed in groups, dropped off the grunts, and returned for more. By that night, Dog was an outpost of Americans in a Vietcong wilderness. Nate and I and three other ships were selected to spend the night there with the grunts as emergency ships for the grunt commander. It drizzled all night.
“Why didn’t they duck?” I sat in my seat staring into the night.
“The VC forced them to stand there.”
“How can you make people stand up to machine-gun bullets?”
“He would have shot them if they had run.”
“But if they had all run, he couldn’t have shot them, not with us right there shooting at him.”
“Obviously they were more afraid of him than they were of us.”
“That was it? They were so afraid that they would get killed that they stood there and got killed?”
“Orientals don’t think like we do.”
Firefights chattered all night, but I didn’t lie awake because of that. I kept replaying the scene. The faces were clear. One old woman chewed betel nut and nodded weakly as the bullets boiled in. One child turned to run, chewed up even while he turned. A woman shrieked at the child; then she was hit, too. The gunner kept firing. I saw it over and over, until I knew everybody in that group. And they all knew me and nodded and smiled and turned and whirled and died.
At three in the morning the firefight got suddenly louder at the edge of the graveyard. A grunt ran up and told us to crank. Fifteen minutes later the firing slowed, and the grunt came by and told us to shut down.
The next morning, Nate and I flew fifty miles south to a place called the Rifle Range, where the rest of our battalion and part of the 227th had set up camp. We moved into a GP with Morris, Decker, Shaker, Daisy, Sherman, and Farris. Resler was still gone. My cot was missing, so I built a stretcher out of two poles and a blanket set across two ammo crates.
We were camped on an old ARVN rifle range near the village of Phu Cat, next to Route 1. About a thousand ROKs from the Korean Tiger Division surrounded us as our security. That was nice, because the ROKs (from Republic of Korea) were devout killers. They spent their dawns beating each other up just for fun.
After a quick lunch Nate and I were back in the air in a flight of two squads going back to Dog. At Dog we loaded up with grunts and set out on the mission.
Farris led the flight. A command ship was to meet us en route and show him the LZ.
“Preacher Six, do you have me in sight?”
“Roger,” said Farris.
“Just watch me. I’m going in now.”
The ship dropped from 1000 feet and set up an approach to one of the clearings below. I thought he was just going to fly over it, but he flared and hovered into the LZ. Rice plants rippled in a circle around him.
“Right here, Preacher flight. It’s all clear.”
That was the only time I ever saw this technique. It looked pretty good. Here was an LZ that really was quiet. The ship nosed over and took off to the north over a stand of trees.
Farris called, “Man your guns,” and we pulled up nice and tight and followed him in.
“Pick your spots,” radioed Farris. The LZ was narrow, so I dropped back a little to land behind the number-two ship.
As we flared, spray from the rice paddy swirled around us. I decided not to land completely but to hover with the skids lightly touching the paddy. The grunts jumped out before we touched, not because of the excitement of the assault but out of habit. A routine landing to a cold LZ.
We waited for thirty seconds while Farris made sure everybody had unloaded. Machine guns opened up from three points. They had us pinned with fire from the front, the left flank, and the rear. I could see the muzzle flashes in the tree line fifty yards away, which blocked our take off path. I pushed pedals furiously and wiggled the ship as we hovered, waiting for Farris. The only gun position I could watch was the one up front, and he was raking us at will. Our door guns couldn’t swing that far forward, so the gunners concentrated on the flank attacks. As I oscillated left and right, I heard one tick, then Farris took off just to the right of the forward VC gun with the rest of us hot on his tail rotor. As we crossed the trees, another VC gun opened up, showering tracers through our flight. I pulled up higher than the rest of the flight and made small, quick turns left and right. As we climbed out, all the guns below us converged on our eight ships. I just kept floundering around, believing firmly that Leese was right: Anything you can do to make yourself a bad target is to your benefit. Moments later we were out of range. Six of the eight helicopters were damaged, and two gunners had been killed. Our ship had taken the one round that had hit us on the ground.
Later, checking the angle at which the round had hit the ship, I found that it had hit while I was pedal-turning in the low hover. The bullet had come up just beside me, at chest level, and lodged in the base of the tail boom, behind me. I was convinced that my evasive tactics had saved my life.
“If you had not moved at all, the bullet would probably have missed you altogether,” said Nate, back at the Rifle Range.
“That particular bullet hit me while I turned right. That means if I hadn’t turned, it would have come into the cockpit.”
“But you couldn’t know that. It was just luck.”
“Yeah. Good luck.”
“But just luck. What if you had turned into a bullet? The same technique could just as easily kill you.”
He was right of course, but I was convinced that I had actually dodged the bullet.
“But what about the takeoff? Everybody else got torn to ribbons,” I countered.
“Look, Mason, if it’s your turn to die, that’s it. Y
ou can’t control the odds. It just wasn’t your day to get zapped.”
“So you’re saying I should just sit there and fly smooth and neat with the rest of the flight? I can’t do that. I can imagine myself on the ground trying to shoot down a Huey. If one ship in the flight is going nuts like I do, I wouldn’t even try to hit it. I’d go for the others.
Nate nodded and sipped some coffee. “I guess if it makes you feel better, you should do it. But I think you’re just pissing into the wind.”
We learned that one gunner had taken a direct hit in the chest armor he was lucky enough to be wearing, and it had stopped the bullet cold. It reminded me of my near hit—which would have got me in the chest—so I got pissed off about the lack of chest protectors in our company. After all the fire we’d taken in the last five months, we still had only a few. We just hadn’t lost enough pilots yet.
The VC fire in this valley was intense. This was their home, and they were thoroughly dug in. No matter where we flew, we were shot at. In two days we had had forty-five ships seriously damaged in our slick battalions. The Chinooks in the 228th had been hit—which had not happened much at Ia Drang—and had lost ten pilots. We thought the C-130 that crashed and burned at the An Khe pass the day before, killing eighty, had been forced down by ground fire.
That night, Nate and I and Morris and Decker rode to the village down the road. I took some pictures of a group of smiling children. We all bought some candles and soap from the little store. On the way back, in the rear of the truck, we complained about our lack of chest armor. Morris sat with his arms folded as we bumped along.
“I talked to a friend of mine at battalion,” he said. “He says we should get a load of chest protectors any day now.”
The truck pulled up beside our mess tent, and as we got out, Decker said, “Yeah, any day now. I wonder how fast he’d get them here if he was flying in this shit.”
The next day, January 31, we launched another mission. This LZ was named Quebec. It was about five miles past Dog.
Dog was now a very large staging area where the bulk of our troopers stayed. If any place was secure in this valley, it was Dog. As the twelve ships on this mission crossed the river for the approach, somebody on the right side of the formation took a hit from the “friendly” village.
We hung around on the ground for about an hour, watching the air-force Phantoms as they hit Quebec with tons of bombs and napalm. I sat on the roof of my Huey and watched the show. At the bottom of their passes, the Phantoms would mush and they’d kick in their afterburners to power out. It was a pretty good show. I could’ve sat there and watched it all day.
While all this was going on, I idly watched two grunts walk out to/set up a claymore mine a hundred yards in front of us. I had gone through a demolition course in Advanced Infantry Training, so I felt a critical interest. The claymore mine is shaped like a crescent. The convex side is pointed toward the enemy. It’s detonated remotely, blasting millions of small wire pieces that shred its victims. As I watched them anchor it in position, it exploded. Both men, one on either side of the mine, were thrown back—torn, lifeless heaps.
What’s next in this carnival? I thought.
The Phantoms finished prepping Quebec, and the air show stopped.
“We’re up. Let’s go,” yelled Williams.
Eight grunts jumped on each ship. We cranked, checked in on the radios, and took off. Nate and I followed the number-two ship, Morris and Decker.
The smoke from the air-force bombing drifted lazily at Quebec as we flew past to set up an approach to the south.
“Preacher Six, Antenna Six. Head south now. VC automatic weapons on your route.” Antenna Six, the Colonel, flew overhead.
“Preacher Six, roger wilco.” Williams started his turn back to the LZ.
“Preacher Six, artillery is still preparing the LZ. Be careful.”
“Roger. Preacher Six now on short final.” The LZ was a narrow strip of brushy, dry sand next to the foothills on the west side of the valley. Following previous instructions, we moved into a staggered trail formation.
“Preacher Six, receiving small-arms fire from the west!” That was Connors.
“Yellow flight, this is Preacher Six. Pick your spots. The LZ is rough.” Williams was just off the ground in his landing flare. Morris and Decker were fifty feet off, and I was behind them maybe a hundred feet.
“Preacher Six, this is Yellow Two. Captain Morris is hit. Captain Morris is hit bad!” Morris’s ship suddenly dropped fast from twenty feet and landed hard.
“Yellow Four is receiving fire from the right.” There was nothing to see on our right except a long row of dead brush.
“Captain Morris is dead! Captain Morris is dead!”
“Roger, Yellow Two.”
“This ship is destroyed. I’m getting out!”
I saw Decker jump out of his Huey as we landed behind him. He leapt to the ground beside the ship, his sawed-off shotgun at the ready. He was faced away from the VC.
Nate called, “Preacher Six, Yellow Three. We’ll pick up Decker and his crew.”
“Negative, Yellow Three. Clear the LZ for the next flight.”
The grunts were off. Some of them scrambled toward Decker, under fire, and pointed him the right way. The troopers stayed low. Sand kicked up under the VC fire.
“Let’s go, Yellow flight.” Williams took off.
As I made the takeoff run beside Decker’s still-running ship, I glanced into the cockpit and saw Morris sitting in the right seat with his head slumped forward on his chest. He seemed to be taking a nap.
Tick. “We’re hit.” Tick-tick-tick.
The gunner that had got Morris was getting us. I pulled in a lot of power and climbed for the sky. I climbed much higher than Williams, and at about 1000 feet, the engine quit. Silence. I bottomed the pitch.
It was my first authentic forced landing, and I was extremely lucky. The spot I was aiming for was the spot I was supposed to land in anyway. It was secure. I skidded ten feet when I hit, and the rotors quietly slowed and stopped.
The crew chief was already inspecting the damage before I got out of the ship. “Four rounds through the fuel lines, sir.” We wouldn’t be flying that ship anymore today. Nate and I stood around while the flight returned to Quebec. I don’t know about him, but I felt cold and clammy while we stood in the blistering heat.
Battalion always had at least one maintenance ship on call for situations like ours. It landed in secure areas to determine whether or not a ship could be fixed on the spot.
I heard the loud whopping of the Huey as it crossed Dog, two miles away. How could anyone be taken by surprise by a flight of Hueys? The thudding slap of the main rotors grew quieter when the ship was a quarter of a mile away, replaced by the buzz of the tail rotor and the hissing whine of the turbine. It landed a hundred feet behind us, starting a brief sandstorm before the pitch was bottomed. The turbine shut off and the rotors spun down. Two specialists, mechanics, ran toward our ship. The crew chief showed them the damage under the engine cowling. They all stuck their noses into the Huey’s innards. Leaving them to their work, I walked back to the maintenance Huey to see who was flying.
It was Riker.
“Somebody hurt?” said Riker. He did not know about Morris.
I stood next to the skid and tried to word what I was going to say while Riker finished freeing himself from the straps. As I began to speak, a painful grin possessed my face. “Morris was shot and killed.”
Riker’s face showed a second of shock and despair, before he too was possessed by the same animal grin. “Really? Morris?”
“Yes. Just a few minutes ago. At Quebec.” I spoke jerkily as I fought with the expression on my face. How could I be grinning?
Riker was having the same problem. His mouth curved into a smile, but his face showed pain. He tried to break the spell by speaking of other things.
“How bad is your ship?”
“Not bad. Fuel lines were hit.”
“Yep. Okay.”
“Where was he hit?” Riker said abruptly. The task of maintaining his composure was beyond him, and his face jerked involuntarily into that horrible grin.
“I don’t really know, but I think he got hit in the chest.”
“Yeah?”
“I think so.”
We were embarrassing each other, so we stopped talking and sat on the sandy grass and smoked a cigarette. The mechanics fiddled with my ship. Nate, who had been watching them curiously, walked over to join us.
“Bob tell you about Morris?” Nate seemed brave and businesslike.
“Yeah. By the way, is Decker all right?” Riker said.
“He’s still in the LZ,” said Nate.
“Really? Why didn’t somebody pick him up?”
“There was too much fire, and Decker jumped out and took cover on the ground. Besides, Williams wouldn’t let us wait to get him.”
“Why not?”
“Well, he was right. The next flight was right behind us, and we probably would’ve just got someone else hurt trying to get Decker to the ship.”
“It doesn’t seem right, just to leave him there.”
“He’ll be okay,” Nate said. “He’s got his trusty old shotgun with him.”
“Sir, the ship’s not flyable,” the mechanic called to Riker.
“Okay.” We all stood up. “You guys interested in a ride back to the Rifle Range for a new ship?”
“You bet,” I said. “Can’t wait to get back into the fight.”
Nate and Riker smiled at my false bravado. Then Riker said, “You guys remember that model he made of the Croatan?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I wonder where it is now?”
An hour later, Nate and I were back in the air. We joined a flight taking more grunts into Quebec. Decker had got out on the next flight. Late that afternoon, after we had replaced two second lieutenants who had been killed and hauled reinforcements in and wounded out, the grunts finally took Quebec, both sandy acres of it. Two machine guns and ten rifles had been hidden in a long trench under that innocent-looking pile of brush. At twilight we landed back at the Rifle Range.