by Robert Mason
“That did it,” said Carpenter’s tired voice. “They stopped.”
Gunfighter Six said, “If things don’t work out to the good, I want you to know that I’m putting you in for the Medal of Honor.”
No reply.
“Also, I’m sure that when we get to you, we’ll find a lot of dead VC.”
“All I can see are my own people…” said the quiet voice.
“We’re sending help,” said Gunfighter Six.
Moments later, Gunfighter Six called us. He wanted us to land at his position, near the artillery emplacement.
“I can’t understand it,” he said. He sat on the deck of our Huey holding a plastic-covered map board. He looked gaunt and sad. He pointed to a circled spot on the green paper. “I don’t understand it. They’ve got to be here.” He was talking about a platoon he was trying to send to Carpenter’s position. But the platoon wasn’t there, because when the men fought in the direction he directed, they found nothing and became pinned down. Gunfighter Six was depressed. He had it all worked out on his game board, and the labels were all in the right place, but the men weren’t.
“I want you to fly out and find this unit.” He pointed to the map. “Find them and give them an azimuth to here.” He moved his finger across the board to Carpenter’s position.
A major and a captain got in the back of our ship with a big radio. We took off.
I flew slowly across the treetops, listening to the grunts’ radio instructions. They could hear our ship. Using our sound, they directed us right over them. During the crisscross search pattern, the enemy did not shoot. But when I found and circled a unit, they opened up from the high ground around us. I heard one tick. I flew past the unit, turned, and came back over them in the exact direction they were to go. “Go this way,” radioed the major from behind us.
The unit rogered its orders. The major had us look for another lost patrol. Again, while we cruised back and forth over the jungle, right in front of the enemy’s hillside, they did not shoot. But as soon as I circled, they opened up. The hillside was peppered with muzzle flashes. We were so close to one NVA barrage we could hear the crackling rifle fire. I felt a thump in the air frame and turned around and saw the major hitting the deck—not shot, but following his instinct to hit the deck under fire. It was kind of funny that he thought the deck was any protection—bullets went through it like tinfoil—but I didn’t laugh.
I turned and came back over the invisible men on the heading they were to follow. As we crossed them, Sky King radioed, “Two-six-zero degrees.” The lieutenant below rogered.
And we did it again. And again. In a couple of hours, we had redirected all the lost units. The ones who still talked, anyway. They were converging on one spot to join up. Gunfighter Six was not only going to secure Carpenter’s position; he was also getting his men together to pull out. He had had enough of this shit. It was time to call in the Cavalry.
We landed back at Gunfighter Six’s position and watched while he told his aides what he had in mind. The plan amounted to this: He was going to have the First Cav send out a battalion or so of troopers and position them north of the fighting, to wait on some ridge tops. He believed that if the air force bombed this area, and then the 101st went back in, they would beat the NVA up to the Cav. The crazy thing was that he believed that the NVA would travel along the ridge tops, not in the valleys. Looking at the map, I could see a thousand ways the NVA could get away, but then I wasn’t an infantry commander. I’m glad I wasn’t.
The briefing was interesting, but we were called out in the middle of it to rescue wounded men.
Sky King told me later that he didn’t believe we were going to make it. The clearing was a tight circle cut out of a stand of saplings, and the grunts had put too many wounded on board for us to hover. To top it off, we were under continuous fire.
What I did was considered reckless. The solution was automatic. The ship lost rpm at a one-foot hover, I could not leave anyone behind—because men were dying—and we were surrounded by fifteen-foot bushes and saplings. But we were on a hill. My instincts told me that if I could get through the barrier, the ship could dive down the side of the hill and we could fly. So, while Sky King advised me that we would have to drop at least one man, I shook my head and headed for the thinnest section of the vegetable wall. Luckily, the rotors are so high above the ground that they had to cut only the thinner tops of the saplings. Our nose forced through the branches and leaves, the skids tugged on clinging things, and the rotors exploded into the stuff. It sounded like we were crashing. Men screamed in the back of the ship. But even as we struggled through the trees and leaves and bushes, the ground dropped beneath us. The rotors cleared the tops, and we dragged the fuselage through the last of the foliage. We burst out of the thicket in a swirl of debris—a turbine-powered brush cutter. I sailed down the side of the hill, picked up some airspeed, and then climbed out. Sky King said, “I don’t fucking believe it!”
I laughed. I was surprised myself.
By that evening, the scattered patrols, platoons, and companies consolidated themselves. It turned out that Carpenter had lost fewer men than he had thought. Only half his company were among the dead or wounded. The others had been separated in the tight brush. The jungle was the enemy’s ally, and as long as he forced us to fight in its strangling hold, we would lose. Carpenter’s heroic, suicidal solution left him miraculously unscathed—and had stopped the rout. But we lost the battle.
The grunts were pulled back past the artillery position to wait for the Cav and the air force. The air force was sending B-52-loads of one-thousand-pound bombs from Guam.
The bombs were supposed to kill a lot of NVA; the survivors were to race up the ridges, pursued by the 101st; and the Cav—way up north—would smash them. The scope was too big. The delay caused by waiting for the air force was too long.
Early the next day, Gary and I and the rest of the Prospectors stopped in our tracks in the company area. A monstrous storm thundered up the valley from the south. The noise grew so loud you couldn’t hear the voices around you. The storm was the monster gaggle sent by the Cav.
The Cav raced up the valley, at least eighty ships, at low level, and fast. The gaggle flew over us and continued north to their assigned objective. Minutes later, the last of their formation disappeared, and the roar silenced.
“Damn! I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many Hueys flying all at once,” someone said. I admit that I felt a sense of pride on seeing my old unit. They were—in this part of the world—the big time.
The Cav’s image lost some of its gloss that same afternoon.
The 101st fought scattered firefights among a hundred branching valleys. A Cav gunship company was borrowed to help out. It was to support a ground commander who had radioed that he wanted the Cav to pulverize a spot where he would throw smoke. Yellow smoke.
Near where the 101st wanted the Cav to strike, a radio operator walked along with his patrol. He carried several smoke grenades on his belt. One of them, of course, was yellow.
At the moment the grunt commander, a mile away from the radio operater, announced that he had thrown yellow smoke, a branch pulled the yellow-smoke grenade from the radio operator’s belt, popping the pin. The radio operator and his platoon were immediately swallowed up in the chalky yellow smoke. The Cav gunships happened to be only a few hundred meters away, looking for the yellow smoke that marked their target.
The gunship rogered that they saw the smoke, and attacked. They even saw people running around under the smoke and thought they were getting old Charlie.
When the commander noticed that his yellow smoke was not being hit—that someone else’s yellow smoke was being attacked—he screamed at the gunships to stop.
It was lucky he did. In just a few seconds they had already killed the radio operator’s platoon leader and wounded twenty-one others, including the radio operator himself.
It was a freak accident, but the Cav was labeled clumsy. And afte
r such a dramatic entrance, too. It ruined their image. The Prospectors and the 101st felt safer, knowing that the Cav would be way up north, somewhere, as the anvil. We were the hammer.
The following day, all the 101st units were pulled back in preparation for the bombing.
The NVA were not dummies. They knew that something was up. They faded into the jungle. According to the hundreds of grease-pencil marks on the maps, the NVA were surrounded, about to be driven along the ridge, north, into the hands of the clumsy but mighty Cav. The next morning, the air force was due for its part of the squeeze.
Sky King and I were assigned to carry a television film crew up and down a dirt road that marked the western boundary of the bombing zone. Pictures of bombs, especially gigantic bombs, going off have great PR value, everyone knows.
The clouds sank into the valley, hiding the mountaintops. Sky King and I cruised nervously, at 500 feet above the road. We had been assured that the air force did not miss, that it was practically impossible to be hit by a stray bomb. Our feeling was, “Bullshit.” The air force misses, a lot.
At the exact moment the bombs were supposed to hit, they did. I had just turned back, heading up the road, when we saw the hillsides a quarter mile away begin to erupt. Intersecting concussion spheres, visible in the close air, suddenly expanded away from the ground. Circles in the heavily wooded hills became instantly nude. The thousand-pound bombs fell in rapid succession, systematically and devastatingly, traveling along the ridges, in the ravines, against the hillsides, a visual staccato of overlapping blasts, tearing the earth asunder. We heard oohs and aahs from the film crew. The pattern of destruction had started across the valley from us and moved closer. Somewhere, 30,000 feet above the cloud cover, some very good bomber crews were keeping the bombs within the designated area. Charlie must be turning into hamburger.
After a half hour of this, the bombs had reached the road. The concussion rings were not only visible; they were tangible. The ship rocked in the explosions. They were going off right on the road, so I moved off the track. One bomb exploded in front of us, past the road, and for a minute I thought we might be seeing just how well a Huey holds up to thousand-pound bombs, when the bombing stopped.
Silence. The valley swirled in stringy smoke. Leafless trees stood at bizarre angles. The ground was gray and charred between monstrous craters. No one could have survived that apocalypse.
The end of the bomb run was the cue, and scores of Hueys flew in, dropping grunts all over the torn valley floor. It was the end of our mission, so I lingered only a little while before turning back to the airstrip.
I was impressed. The film crew was impressed. The grunts were impressed. But the gooks were not impressed. They were gone. They did leave behind a few men, and these were captured, dazed but intact—something like twenty NVA.
So now it was up to the Cav.
The Cav searched the ridges and the valleys for two days. And then they closed back to the bombed valley. When the net was closed, no fish were found. The dumb little barbarians had got away, showing not the least respect for superior technology. They had used judo, and bent with the force.
But a bombing was a bombing, and fighting is fighting, and many men had been heroic indeed. The battle, though lost, had been impressive.
General Westmoreland himself flew up from Saigon to pin on medals. Captain Carpenter was given a silver star and was put on Westmoreland’s staff.
Near the end of June, I got very twitchy. Being a short-timer made life difficult. It would almost be better not to know when you were due to return. As the day drew closer—only fifty days to go—the possibility of dying seemed more imminent, like I had already used up my breaks and would be getting it any day now. Somewhere between now and the day I left was the mission, probably a typical little mission-light fire—and just one little stray bullet would go through my forehead.
Nights were hell. Even with the tranquilizers Doc DaVinci gave me, I kept snapping awake at unseen dangers. Daytime was fine when I flew. The ice business also kept me busy. But when I wasn’t flying—a few hours between missions, or a day off—I grew morose. Nothing that I saw convinced me that we were doing the right thing in Vietnam. I even harbored a sympathy for the enemy, which made me feel guilty.
The local war, the one I was in, went on every day. I was part of it. In the air, I did my job the best I knew how. I flew, as did all the pilots, into hot LZs, because in the middle of the confusion the hazy principles over which the war was fought disappeared. Everything else was excluded. Even I was excluded.
When Deacon finally let Gary and me fly together, our first mission was to resupply a small patrol in the jungle. We used off-course navigation to find them, a method that wasn’t taught in flight school. Monk had told me about it.
In standard dead-reckoning you corrected a plotted course for wind drift, but you never knew which way to look when you’d flown long enough to be at your target. The wind-drift correction was a calculation. The actual track you’d made was off to one side or the other. But which side?
In off-course navigation you don’t correct for wind drift. You fly the magnetic course you plotted on the map for the length of time you calculated, and then you know where to look—upwind.
We found our resupply target without incident.
After lunch a firefight broke out close to the airstrip, near where we had left the ARVNs that first day. There were casualties, and the men needed ammo. Gary and I made it into a tiny clearing cut on a ledge. There was just enough room to squeeze the rotors in, leaving the tail hanging over space. The grunts threw some of their wounded on board, gunfire began crackling, and the grunts waved vigorously for us to leave. Takeoff from such a nook is backwards. As the nose and the rotors clear the obstruction, you push the right pedal and the whole machine pivots as it’s flying so that the nose and tail trade places, putting you back to the normal posture. That’s what we did.
At the hospital pod, the medics had the wounded off in seconds. Gary and I took off to go back for a second load.
“Damn. They said this whole damn area was secure weeks ago,” Gary complained.
“They must not have told Charlie,” I said.
“That’s the truth.”
The unit told us to wait. There was a small firefight going on.
I circled high over the valley, out of small-arms range. From the orbit, we could see some smoke up in the north where we had worked that morning. To the west was more smoke from some 101st units who were moving in that direction. The Americans were working a very large section of territory, but from up high it seemed very small. The sea of jungle stretched for hundreds of miles in every direction. And you could go anywhere you wanted under that canopy.
“Okay, Prospector, we’re secure.”
“Roger, we’re on our way,” called Gary.
From the orbit, I dropped toward the peak of the hill, dropped below it, and settled into a descent along a ravine that led to the nook. We had picked up a load of ammo on the way and could barely hover at this altitude. I had to time the approach so that I lost translational lift as the ship moved onto the ledge. When we were moving at maybe 30 miles an hour, with 100 yards to go, our right-door gun exploded. The gunner saw muzzle flashes. With 50 feet to go, the most critical part of the approach, the ground guide started waving me away.
This was no place to stop.
I kept coming. Then two more men jumped up and waved me away. At the same time, a voice on the radio yelled, “Don’t land. We’re under heavy fire!”
This was a new one for me. Normally, I could just fly over the LZ if we had to abort. But this one was on the side of a hill. Enclosed on both sides by the ravine, T couldn’t turn away either. But there was space behind and below us. I flared the ship to stop the approach Since it couldn’t hover, it began to sink. Nose high, the ship slid tail-down into the ravine. As we fell, I used the right pedal to bring the nose around, but I let it continue to fall, to get airspeed. I accelerated in
to the ravine. The airspeed came up to about 70. Then we were a flying machine again, and I swooped up between some trees on the ridge beside the ravine. The grunts had seen us tumbling into the ravine. We disappeared as the ravine turned, and they thought we crashed. But lo! the Huey jumped out of the jungle, to their amazement.
We finally got back to the nook, dropped the ammo, and picked up the rest of the wounded. As usual with the last trip, some dead men also rode back with us.
That afternoon, I took Gary with me to pick up the ice.
13. Tell Me You’re Afraid
I am sure we are going to win.
—Nguyen Cao Ky, in U.S. News & World Report, August 1, 1966
A Communist military takeover in South Vietnam is no longer just improbable… it is impossible.
—Lyndon Johnson, August 14, 1966 (after conferring with General Westmoreland at the LBJ Ranch)
July—August 1966
Sleep no longer gave me peace. I had escaped Vietnam with an R&R to Hong Kong, but I had not escaped my memories.
Twenty-one men lay trussed in a row, ropes at their ankles, hands bound under their backs—North Vietnamese prisoners. A sergeant stood at the first prisoner’s feet, his face twisted with anger. The North Vietnamese prisoner stared back, unblinking. The sergeant pointed a .45 at the man. He kicked the prisoner’s feet suddenly. The shock of the impact jostled the prisoner inches across the earth. The sergeant fired the .45 into the prisoner’s face. The prisoner’s head bounced off the ground like a ball slapped from above, then flopped back into the gore that had been his brains. The sergeant turned to the next prisoner in the line.
“He tried to get away,” said a voice at my side.
“He can’t get away; he’s tied!”