Legend

by Eric Blehm

  At Loc Ninh, Yurman turned due west, flew past a deserted French fort and toward the border. Though the border was ambiguous and difficult to determine on the ground, from the air, the large scorched slashes of jungle and B-52–bombed wasteland dimpled with water-filled craters gave it away. Just as Yurman crossed the area, a voice cut in over the emergency radio guard channel to say, “Aircraft entering Pepper Pot—be advised.” Air Traffic Control had picked him up on radar; he was now in Cambodian airspace.

  Helicopter pilots in Vietnam had for a time sought out bomb craters as opportune landing zones. But the enemy quickly learned this tactic and began to devise ingenious spotting and ambush tactics, constructing platforms from the splintered, blown-up trees beside the craters, then covering the platforms with thick soil from the craters’ centers. When the craters filled with new plant growth from monsoonal rains, the earthen roofs of these platforms sprouted as well, rendering them—and the enemy-manned PKM machine guns beneath—invisible to the American and South Vietnamese air forces that dominated the sky.

  Now Yurman left this pockmarked border region behind, and the Cambodian jungle stretched out before him like a carpet. There was little relief to the terrain, few hills with which to mask a helicopter’s approach. The only option the American helicopter pilots had was to fly low and fast. At a speed of eighty or ninety knots, a helicopter passed over before the enemy beneath the canopy could react; as a result, the chance of dropping into a pack of “sharks” within this vast green sea was slim. At least that’s what Yurman kept trying to convince himself. In his mind, the sharks were potentially anywhere and everywhere. Flying in was a crapshoot.

  On previous missions, he’d always dropped the patrols a good distance from areas known to host the enemy—areas such as the giant, snaking road he could see from three thousand feet: the Ho Chi Minh Trail. He made a slow, orbiting bank so that Wright and Jones could take a closer look with binoculars. But even without binoculars, the trucks streaming down what Yurman called the “Ho Chi Minh Turnpike” were clearly visible, reminding him of the heavy traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike back home.

  Thinking that photographs would answer the question of whether there were Russian trucks on the trail, Yurman asked Jones if his crew chief should get out the camera he kept with him, the one with the zoom lens.

  Jones thought it was a good idea, and Yurman banked again for the photo op, maintaining his altitude well above small-arms fire, but making the C&C completely vulnerable to a surface-to-air rocket. He took another slow bank back at three thousand feet when Wright vectored him in on a section of jungle east of the road, a small green fingerprint within the darker forest green. The clearing was, by his estimate, less than a half mile from the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  “Mark that,” Jones said as he leaned forward into the cockpit. “That’s our LZ.”

  “That?” Yurman asked. “Right next to the road that looks like the Jersey Turnpike?”

  9

  THE LAUNCH

  CREW CHIEF PAUL LaChance, who had transferred from Greyhound One to Mad Dog Three, was up before the sun on the morning of May 2, 1968, grabbing a cup of coffee in the 1st Infantry mess. He and the rest of the 240th currently attached to B-56 at Quan Loi were, as of 0600 hours, on twenty-four-hour alert.

  Coffee in hand, LaChance headed out to the flight line, where his right-door gunner, Specialist 4 Jeff Colman, was ready to perform the daily inspection of their aircraft, including the M21 armament system—miniguns—and rocket pods. Today, the two gunship teams were Mad Dog One and Two, piloted by chief warrant officers William Curry and Michael Grant, and Mad Dog Three and Four, piloted by Chief Warrant Officers Louis Wilson and Gary Whitaker.

  All was quiet except for the pulsing drone of the generators. As he walked, the light-blue dawn rose into the inky darkness of the eastern horizon. To the west, all was still black in the forbidden zone. Cambodia. LaChance was a big James Bond fan, had seen You Only Live Twice shortly before his tour began, and he thought the feeling that morning was very Double-O-Seven. If he went down in Cambodia and was captured, he’d be considered a spy—they all would. But his goal was the same as that for every mission: “get the team in, get the team out, and get home alive.”

  —

  A LITTLE after 11:00 a.m., Yurman approached his C&C slick, which was parked within a revetment beside the rest of the Greyhound slicks, and found his copilot, Thomas Smith, already waiting by the door, his flight helmet on the seat. Yurman’s boss, the 240th’s new company commander, Major Jesse James—who Yurman had thought was back at Bearcat—was there talking to Lieutenant Jones and another Special Forces major.

  Yurman soon realized that the Special Forces major had been sent over from Ho Ngoc Tao, by Drake, to ride along and “observe” the mission and that James had come over to fly it. “Who’s your copilot?” James asked Yurman, who nodded toward Smith.

  “Tell him you’re taking his seat,” James said. “I’ll take yours.”

  James then pulled a stack of black-and-whites from a folder he was carrying and showed Yurman an aerial photograph of a convoy of trucks and a close-up of one particular truck. “These are the photos your crew chief took at the objective. The major here says it’s Russian—the same model as the one they captured up in the A Shau Valley last week.”

  The photos, it turned out, had been developed at Ho Ngoc Tao’s new photo lab right after the recon flight. “So they saw the photos that confirmed the trucks were on the trail and they still need to send a team in to try and get one?” Yurman asked.

  James nodded.

  If Yurman had known James well enough to be candid, he would have replied: “Sir, I think this whole thing is a bunch of John Wayne, Hollywood bullshit. You don’t steal a truck off the Ho Chi Minh Turnpike and not get compromised.”

  Instead, he informed Smith he had the afternoon off and climbed into the right seat. While waiting for the green light to launch, Yurman felt the weight of his impending duties. If James flew this mission, Yurman would be responsible for both identifying the LZ and directing the insertion slicks to the location. James had only been with the company a few weeks and was not yet familiar with their insertion tactics, nor had he been on the visual recon flight and seen the LZ. The formation would be tight, the flying tricky: low level and high speed.

  Yurman had no idea how Major James, his new commander, would react to his planned proposal that he—a lower-ranked officer—do the flying.

  —

  BACK INSIDE the B-56 compound, the twelve-man team assigned to the mission was assembled and waiting for a truck to shuttle them over to the helicopter pads. It was led by Team Leader (TL) Leroy Wright and consisted of seven CIDG that included Tuan (the interpreter), Bao (the point man), and Chien (the grenadier), two South Vietnamese Special Forces warrant officers, the radioman, Brian O’Connor, and the assistant team leader (ATL), twenty-four-year-old Staff Sergeant Lloyd Mousseau, who was four months into his second tour in Vietnam and in his seventh year in the Army. Mousseau had begun his first tour in an administrative role in Saigon, but had been—like many of the best recon men—recruited by SOG team leaders in-country. His training had been almost entirely on the job, and after another mission or two, he’d get his own team.

  Each man checked his own and each other’s gear, making sure anything that might rattle was either taped or strapped down. “They’d done this so many times,” says Jones, “that the pre-mission planning amounted to little more than going over the map, pointing out the LZ, objective, and alternate LZs, and then launching. It wasn’t like Hollywood, with scale models of the objectives and weeks of training. That happened, but it was rare. This mission was like most: a couple of hours prep, a few questions, and they’re good to go. The guys who knew what they were doing, knew that everything changed once they were on the ground.”

  There was no formal formation pre-launch; they did not stand at attention while Wr
ight walked the line. They mingled, then loaded onto a truck and drove to the tarmac.

  Daily temperatures in Vietnam ranged between 80 and 95 degrees Fahrenheit with 80 percent humidity, and Crew Chief LaChance was soaked with sweat by the time he finished the preflight checklist for his Mad Dog Three gunship. Glancing up at the sound of a vehicle, he saw the B-56 recon team arrive, dressed “like the VC or NVA.”

  As they neared the helicopters, a transformation occurred among the team members. “Any and all talk or chatter between us ceased, as did any last-minute adjustments of a strap or harness,” says O’Connor. “Silence and a form of stoic stillness set in. We were no longer a group of men preparing for a mission, and a few simple hand signals verified the fact—we were now on it.”

  LaChance watched the men climb onboard the two lead slicks, with “one or two of the CIDG wearing those NVA helmets; the Americans carried shortened machine guns, AK-47s, camouflaged faces, and big rucksacks. I rode a helicopter to work and didn’t hoof it on foot, so any rucksack looked big and heavy to me. I was in awe of those guys, and they looked to me like they were either packing a lot of ammo or going in for a while.”

  —

  “READY ON the P, Chief?” Louis Wilson’s voice came over the onboard intercom. LaChance checked power and confirmed, “Ready on the P,” and Wilson reached to the control panel between himself and his copilot to start the auxiliary power required to crank the engine. There was a brief whoosh as the engine ignited, and the rotor blades began to rotate and whir.

  One Greyhound slick carrying half of the Special Forces team lifted off, then the other, while the Mad Dogs held at flight idle—a united whine of turbines. Jet fuel exhaust fumes filled the gunships’ interiors as their pilots awaited clearance, and for a moment LaChance could have imagined he was driving behind a real Greyhound bus back home in New England on a humid summer day—if it weren’t for the potpourri of sewage, cookfires, and the sweet rot of decaying jungle.

  He slid down off his seat behind his M60, which hung from the doorway on a bungee cord, and hopped over the skid to the ground. As the pilot pulled pitch and the helicopter lifted slightly off the ground and began to inch ahead, he and his gunner, Jeff Colman, moved forward alongside it. The crew chiefs and gunners on the other three helicopters were doing the same, taking their Mad Dogs for their daily walk. It was a necessary ritual; their gunships were so weighted down with fuel, weaponry, and ammunition, they could not get off the ground without the weight of these men removed while the pilots coaxed their aircraft into the air by literally skidding and bouncing down the runway.

  Watching a fully loaded or overloaded Huey take off was nothing like the catapulting of a jet off an aircraft carrier or the nimble, featherweight launch of a reconnaissance plane. Even the lumbering C-130 could somehow find grace two-thirds of the way down a runway. Helicopters—in spite of being the ground warrior’s best airborne friend in this jungle war—were not only awkward at takeoff, they were ungainly, their crews running alongside, bouncing them up and down off the runway as the skids threw sparks. At the right moment, LaChance and Colman hopped lightly onto the skid and into the back and the helicopter picked up speed and gradually ascended.

  “You can’t help but have the feeling that there will come a future generation of men…who will look at old pictures of helicopters and say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ ” said ABC news correspondent Harry Reasoner, reporting from Vietnam in the late sixties. “The thing is, helicopters are different from airplanes. An airplane by its nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or incompetent piloting, it will fly.

  “A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces and controls working in opposition to each other. And if there is any disturbance in this delicate balance, the helicopter stops flying—immediately and disastrously.

  “There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter.

  “That’s why being a helicopter pilot is so different from being an airplane pilot, and why in generality airplane pilots are open, clear-eyed, buoyant extroverts. And helicopter pilots are brooders, introspective anticipators of trouble.

  “They know if something bad has not happened, it is about to.”

  —

  THE C&C slick fell in behind and just above Greyhound One and Two with James in the left pilot seat. Though lower in rank and seated in the right copilot position, Yurman was still the acting aircraft (and airmission) commander, focused on the controls while scanning the surrounding airspace, an unusual rank arrangement that James had been receptive to when Yurman proposed it.

  Shortly after entering Cambodian airspace, Yurman made contact with his Greyhound slick commanders on one channel; another allowed him to converse with the team’s forward air controller. Trailing behind the slicks as they approached the border were the accompanying gunships Mad Dog One and Two, piloted by William Curry and Michael Grant.

  The other four helicopters, Greyhound Three and Four and Mad Dog Three and Four, flew five minutes northwest from Ho Ngoc Tao to the Loc Ninh Special Forces camp, where they powered down and sat on alert on the helicopter tarmac adjacent to the camp’s artillery battery—call sign “Deadly.”

  Louis Wilson had felt a certain eeriness as he’d set his skids down on the tarmac at Loc Ninh. He’d heard from an engineer who had helped build the jungle airstrip back in November of 1967 that the blacktop was the lid for a mass grave of Vietcong who’d attacked the camp in late October. The fighting had been fierce and lasted for days; bodies were bloating in the sun where they’d fallen, from the rubber tree plantation at the far end of the strip all the way down the dirt runway to the Special Forces camp. “Deadly” had, on various occasions during the course of battle, leveled its massive guns horizontally and fired anti-personnel “beehive” rounds (packed with metal darts, or “flechettes,” they represented a swarm of buzzing death for ground troops) down the runway to repel the Vietcong’s charges.

  When the VC had finally retreated back into Cambodia, Army engineers first bulldozed the enemy bodies into the trees. The stench became so bad, however, that the mass grave with its blacktop lid was ordered.

  Mad Dog Four crew chief Pete Gailis made himself a cup of instant coffee by filling a C ration can with a handful of dirt soaked with jet fuel that had dripped from his gunship’s fuel tank drainage valve. Once the dirt was lit, it turned the can into a ministove that heated a cup of coffee in a minute.

  It was pretty late in the day for a covert mission, thought Gailis, but making insertions at all hours kept the enemy guessing. And while the cover of darkness would in future decades be the norm for special ops, when every operator would use night-vision goggles, soldiers in 1968 had only an early generation of night vision. An entire team would share a “starlight scope.”

  The general wisdom was that “Charlie owned the night,” especially on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Yurman, in the C&C slick, had believed it as well—before yesterday’s recon flight, when they’d found the road bustling with traffic in the middle of the day.

  He had expected a sleepy, inactive road—and a sleepy, inactive, unsuspecting enemy. One can still hope, he thought. One can still hope.

  —

  WRIGHT, O’CONNOR, Tuan, Bao, Chien, and other CIDG were inside Greyhound One; Mousseau and five CIDG had piled into Greyhound Two. The “heavy” team—double the size of a standard recon team—was the maximum number of American personnel permitted by the Johnson administration to operate as a single unit “over the fence.”

  They crossed the Cambodian border, where the accompanying gunships went into a holding pattern to lessen the air activity near the insertion point. McKibben and Ewing dropped their Greyhounds to treetop level west toward the LZ. Flying a few thousand feet above Yurman’s C&C slick, which was just above and behind Greyhound One and Two, twenty-six-year-old Air Force captain Robin Tornow, the B-56 tea
m’s forward air controller (FAC), announced over the radio of his O1-F Bird Dog Cessna that vehicle traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail a half mile west of the LZ was light. Insanity, thought Yurman. He still couldn’t believe they were inserting guys this close to the road.

  Roughly 150 yards by 100 yards, the kidney-shaped LZ tapered to a narrow arm that jutted into the jungle to the northwest; the main clearing was a wide-open meadow to the east. Knee- to waist-high grass dominated the eastern half of the clearing, with a few bushes scattered here and there. Just west of center were two clumps of trees, small thickets or “islands” of cover surrounded by a sea of waving grass. Running east to west through the middle of the twenty-foot-tall wispy trees in the larger southernmost thicket was an oblong anthill, ten feet long and waist high. Farther west of these thickets, the grass was joined by thicker concentrations of bushes and small trees.

  Once Yurman had talked the two slick pilots in close enough to have eyes on the landing zone—seventy-five or one hundred yards—he peeled off so as not to overfly the LZ, while McKibben dropped into it, flared to a hover a couple feet off the ground; seconds later Wright, O’Connor, and the four CIDG were running toward the northern edge of the clearing. McKibben lifted off and was just clearing the treetops when Ewing came in to drop Mousseau and his five CIDG. Banking low and hard, both slicks reversed direction and were gone by the time the team had traversed the forty exposed yards and disappeared into the jungle. While the men checked their equipment, Wright did a quick head count and made radio contact with Tornow, flying overhead at four thousand feet—a speck barely visible against a light-blue sky scattered with high clouds.