Legend

by Eric Blehm

“I can’t see them,” Ewing said. “Anybody see them?”

  “I see them,” Tagliaferri said. “They’re directly below us!”

  “I can’t see them!” Ewing yelled. “And we’re taking hits.” He wasn’t about to put the brakes on to hover and drop straight down into a smoky void without eyes on the team; he’d circle back around.

  “We are not taking hits!” Tagliaferri said.

  “I just got hit in the leg!”

  Immediately Tagliaferri leapt into action, moving forward and grabbing the lever on Ewing’s seat in order to yank it back and provide first aid.

  “No! No! I’m fine, Tag, I’m fine,” Ewing said. “I felt a bullet hit my pant leg, my boot—but I’m fine.”

  Tagliaferri locked the seat back in place and returned to his gun.

  “Stand down, Greyhound Two,” ordered Yurman. “We’re gonna put in some more tac air. How’s your fuel?”

  “I’m good for one more go.”

  “Okay, Jerry. Repeat, stand by. I repeat, we have tac air incoming.”

  —

  O’CONNOR WAS beyond tired; he was exhausted. Gone was the adrenaline that had coursed through his body and sustained him the past few hours. The fighting had been unrelenting. Any second, one of these bullets was going to make a hole he couldn’t plug. Tuan was unconscious at his position.

  The air strikes must have killed hundreds of the enemy—but still they came. They were everywhere.

  “Hang on,” Tornow said over the radio. “We’ve got more tac air coming in, and then we’ll attempt another extraction. Where do you want it?”

  Anywhere around the tree line to the south or west was good, O’Connor replied. He looked toward the other thicket and saw Mousseau leaning against two of the dead CIDG, which he had stacked like sandbags, the remaining three CIDG forming a triangular perimeter around him. He pointed up at the sky, holding his radio in his hand, and O’Connor signaled back. They tried to flatten themselves even farther into the earth they were sprawled on.

  The first run hit the southern side of the PZ; then, instead of a second pass, the jets diverted to target a group of trucks coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the west—hopefully clogging the road and killing the reinforcements that seemed limitless. O’Connor heard but didn’t feel this set of explosions. Because they sounded farther away, he figured that the jets were out of ordnance and returning to base.

  Mousseau and his split team remained vigilant. Not much was left of their thicket, its small trees splintered to pieces by the thousands of incoming rounds.

  Despite his worsening condition and narcotic haze, O’Connor maintained his position at one side of the anthill, facing what he surmised was the enemy’s most favorable approach. He was nearly out of ammunition: down to whatever was left in the clip of his carbine and a single spare clip, and his .22 “monkey” pistol with its silencer. Still unconscious and circling the drain, Tuan had a few grenades left in his webbing. If he had to, O’Connor could use those and the interpreter’s AK-47, which might give an attacking NVA a moment of pause.

  It was quiet again after that last bombing, and during this calm, O’Connor began to fade into unconsciousness, engulfed by the smoke, stagnant air, and smell of death.

  “They’re coming in!” Mousseau shouted, jolting O’Connor back to the living. Assuming the enemy was mounting a final assault to overrun the team, O’Connor “prepared for the worst,” he later wrote. “I started to contact the FAC or C&C, but spreads of heavy auto, mortar, rockets, and grenades filled the PZ. I caught a burst of autofire in the abdomen, and the radio was shot out. I was put out of commission and just lay behind Wright’s body, firing at the NVA in the open field until the ammo ran out.

  “I was ready to die.”

  12

  IF SOMEONE NEEDS HELP…

  AT LOC NINH, Roy Benavidez gently set Michael Craig’s body on a stretcher beside Greyhound Three. He said a prayer, then walked away, leaving Roger Waggie and David Hoffman kneeling beside their dead crew chief.

  Within a few minutes, two more helicopters from the 240th returned from the border. The first was Mad Dog Two, the second gunship in the fire team for Greyhound Three and Four’s extraction attempt. Pilot Michael Grant had been forced to abort his support run when Curry in Mad Dog One began trailing smoke and banked away from the PZ. Grant’s aircraft had been shot up even more than Curry’s, but somehow he’d stayed in the air long enough to help cover the downed crew until backup arrived. His control system was badly damaged, however, and Grant had been uncertain that he could make it back the extra miles to Quan Loi—the designated base for refueling, rearming, and maintenance on the mission.

  Following close behind was Larry McKibben in Greyhound One, carrying Curry and his crew—all of whom had shrapnel and/or bullet wounds. They were immediately transferred to a medical transport helicopter and whisked away to the field hospital at Quan Loi.

  Roy walked from helicopter to helicopter, overhearing conversations and collecting snippets of information from their crews: “Never saw ground fire like that before…” “If there’s not at least a battalion of NVA down there…” From what he was witnessing—the radio transmittals, the firsthand reports from the extraction attempts, the shot-up aircraft, the death of Michael Craig—Roy held little hope for the team’s survival.

  He returned to Greyhound Three, where Waggie and Hoffman were going over their slick and counting bullet holes: fourteen in all, the worst of them a gaping, jagged gash on the panel that covered the tail rotor driveshaft. With closer inspection, they realized that it had been caused by a bullet ricocheting off a bearing; they weren’t sure how much longer this aircraft could fly.

  Roy, who still hadn’t found out which Special Forces team members were involved, asked Waggie if he had any idea. Waggie didn’t know their names, but he recalled seeing “that big black sergeant” among them when he’d flown backup during the insertion. That man, Roy suspected, was his friend Leroy Wright.

  There was a hum of turbines, and Roy saw the rotors on Larry McKibben’s slick begin to spin. Without a moment’s pause, he grabbed a medical bag that had been left on the helicopter pad and ran to Greyhound One. In back, crew chief Dan Christensen and his gunner, Nelson Fournier, were behind their weapons.

  “You going back in?” Roy asked.

  “We’re gonna try,” said Christensen. “At least drop them some ammo.” He held up an assault pack of ammunition.

  “I’m in,” Roy said. “You need a bellyman.”

  Christensen informed McKibben over his intercom, and McKibben looked back to see Roy, medical bag in hand, already halfway inside the slick. He gave Roy a thumbs-up, and Roy climbed all the way in and set the medical bag on the floor beside him.

  Then they were airborne, flying low over the pancake-flat farmland of the Mekong Delta, leaving the ominous round hump of Nui Ba Den rising three thousand feet above the delta in their wake. The American radio relay station on the mountaintop—which Roy had used to keep tabs on a different Special Forces team the night before—was critical for missions into Cambodia.

  Everyone on board was silent and stone faced—and Roy was just another passenger taking the bus to work. Christensen and Fournier were cordial strangers; they looked out their windows down the barrels of their M60s, keeping to themselves, leaving the driving to the guy on the stick up front.

  Although they were all working on the same team and had the same objective, they had little to say and knew little to nothing about one another. Roy didn’t know that Larry McKibben, the pilot, was a fellow Texan, with a sister whom he missed like crazy about to graduate from high school, or that he sent home tape-recorded letters every chance he got. Or that the copilot, Warrant Officer William Fernan, was, at twenty-six, the old man on the slick’s crew, with a wife named Diane and a degree in biology from the University of Washington that allowed him to actually identif
y many of the plants and trees of the jungle they were flying over.

  Nor did Roy know that Christensen was a twenty-four-year-old father of three from Wisconsin who spent his summers in the Dakotas baling and combining wheat and hay. Or that nineteen-year-old Fournier went by the nickname “Sonny Boy” back home and was a favorite human jungle gym for his nieces and nephews. One of Fournier’s proudest moments, after getting his helicopter door gunner’s wings, had been winning a radio in a raffle right before he’d deployed. It was the only thing he’d ever won.

  As he watched the world rush by below, Roy pondered his spontaneous decision. Was it because he couldn’t sit back and listen to his friends getting slaughtered and not do anything about it? Was it an involuntary response, like when he was a kid, jumping into a fight without considering the consequences? Was it his Yaqui blood, the ancestral warrior in him? Or was it rooted in the lesson he’d learned from Grandfather Salvador? When someone needs help, you help them.

  He noted the aircraft commander and copilot’s personal weapons: two M16s strapped on the back wall. In the event of a crash landing, the crew chief would hand these weapons to the pilots as they exited the helicopter. Both gunners also had holstered .38s strapped to their thighs, and Roy realized with a start that in his haste he had broken the cardinal rule of any Special Forces soldier; the most basic rule of a buckprivate grunt. He was going into battle without his weapon.

  Had this been a regular mission, he’d have brought along his carbine and revolver as unconsciously as he’d bring his arms and legs. But he was not on a regular mission, and he carried none of his normal survival gear: radio, a compass or two, pen flares, a map, signal mirror, two or three shots of morphine. He had no web gear, the load-bearing, vest-like carryall that accommodated the standard twenty-one magazines of ammunition, his pistol, water canteens, smoke canisters, and grenades. He had no rucksack, which carried extras of all the items above, plus a Claymore mine, explosives, medical supplies—including a blood expander and IV bags—and other mission-specific equipment. Strapped to the side of the rucksack was a short machete called a “banana knife,” and, shoved around anything that might rattle, he kept his poncho and poncho liner, as well as food rations to sustain him for a day or two. Beyond all of this, and his personal weapon, he would carry an extra weapon—a grenade launcher or a sawed-off shotgun.

  Today, as he sped to the massive firefight taking place within Cambodia, Roy had with him the medical bag, the small bottle of Tabasco sauce he’d intended to use for the breakfast he hadn’t eaten, and his recon knife, eight inches of steel blade custom made without a serial number or identifying marks at the Counterinsurgency Support Office in Okinawa, Japan.

  He was covered head to toe in tiger-striped camouflaged combat fatigues, but he might as well have been wearing one of the loincloths of the Montagnard tribesmen employed by SOG—something Green Berets had been known to do while training and bonding with the indigenous warriors who fought beside them. They called it “going native.”

  Not long after 3:00 p.m. Ewing in Greyhound Two was orbiting east of the PZ, waiting for the air strikes to stop so he could follow in as second extraction slick to whoever was inbound, when Yurman came over the radio and instructed him to come around and begin a descent for a low-level vector into the PZ. Taken aback, Ewing replied, “It’s not my turn,” then immediately thought, What the fuck? Did I really just say that?

  “We’ve got an opening; I need you now,” said Yurman, and Ewing rogered, circled, and set up for final approach.

  “I’m here, Greyhound Two,” McKibben announced over the radio. “I’ll go in next.”

  “Negative, Greyhound One,” Ewing said. “I’m already on my way in.”

  “Nope, my turn,” said McKibben as he banked wide around Ewing and cut in front of him.

  “Okay, Greyhound One,” Ewing replied. “I’ll go down with you to draw some fire.”

  Roy listened in over the radio while McKibben flipped to the ground frequency and announced that they were incoming. The only response was gunfire.

  “It’s going to be hot,” McKibben told his crew. “If they can’t get to us or we can’t get to them, we’ll drop ammo.”

  Both Christensen and Fournier checked their weapons and positioned themselves with their M60s down and forward, ready to provide suppressive fire. Looking forward through the cockpit, Roy saw nothing but treetops and smoke.

  —

  O’CONNOR WAS lying behind Wright’s body, bleeding steadily, fading in and out of consciousness, waiting to be overrun, when through the din of gunfire he heard the faint but distinct whop, whop, whop of approaching helicopters.

  The beating rotors coaxed him away from the descending darkness, allowing a sliver of hope. He envisioned a swarm of helicopters, brimming with weaponry and soldiers, a “strike force coming en masse to recover what was left [of us],” he would write in his statement, “but instead a lone slick flew into the middle of the PZ and hovered with door gunners blazing.”

  The enemy fire shifted from the team on the ground to Greyhound One. McKibben had dropped into the PZ a hundred yards east of the thickets and flared to a hover ten or fifteen feet off the ground. Faint streaks—NVA tracer rounds—crisscrossed from both sides of the clearing while the door gunners returned fire, blasting away at the tree line. To Christensen, there were so many barrel flashes it looked like the blinking lights on a Christmas tree.

  “We’re taking heavy fire,” McKibben reported over his microphone. “I don’t think we can get in close enough.” He began to pull pitch.

  “Wait!” Roy shouted back. He edged his way to the door of the slick. “Just get me as close as you can. I’ll get to them.” With one hand on the medical bag and his feet dangling, he watched the grass swirl about from the rotor wash, ten or fifteen feet below, while Fournier strafed the trees with his M60 on full automatic. Taking a deep breath, Roy crossed himself several times, pushed the medical bag out the door, and jumped.

  —

  PETE GAILIS was looking down on Greyhound One from Mad Dog Four as his pilot, Gary Whitaker, dove into the PZ and released two rockets. Warrant Officer Cook, the copilot, directed his miniguns on a group of NVA, and seventeen-year-old Specialist 4 Danny Clark, an infantryman turned door gunner, swung his gun methodically from target to target, dropping the enemy with short bursts from his M60. Having been outnumbered himself on a search-and-destroy mission just months prior, Clark knew that every NVA he killed from the air took some heat off the guys on the ground.

  On the other side of the gunship, Gailis had swung his M60 on a smooth, steady arc to the left, providing suppressive fire into the southern tree line. The helicopter banked, and he could see Greyhound One drop down suddenly, flare, and hover off the ground in the northeast corner of the PZ, some distance east of the beleaguered team.

  As tracers flew everywhere, several NVA soldiers ran into the open and sprayed the slick with bullets. A body went out its door and Gailis thought, Oh my God, they’re shooting ’em out of the aircraft! It was inconceivable to him that anyone would “willingly jump into the battle when everybody on the ground wanted out.”

  O’Connor watched the Special Forces soldier in his jungle fatigues jump from the helicopter and disappear in the grass. Then he was up and running hard, following in the wake of the slick that had dropped its nose and raced toward the team’s position, gaining altitude as it went. O’Connor provided cover fire for the lone soldier, pausing briefly to look up as the slick passed directly overhead. A crewman tossed out a web belt of ammo pouches, but its trajectory took the belt far beyond his position, landing to the west of the thickets.

  Detail left

  Detail right

  Just a few strides into his mad dash, fifty yards from O’Connor, the soldier abruptly went down. He was back up and running a moment later, heading for the nearest cover: the northern thicket where Mousseau was a
lso providing cover fire.

  Bullets tore up the grass around the soldier as he ran, and at least two RPGs were fired at him. He went down a second time.

  Mad Dog Four banked low and tight over the trees and came back around, with both Gailis and Clark firing on automatic, raining brass over the floor of the helicopter and out the doors into the PZ below. When the M60 ammo, mini-gun ammo, and rockets were gone, Whitaker made one more pass to draw fire, and both gunners took up their M16s and fired their remaining bullets as Gailis searched the grass for the soldier he thought had been shot from the slick.

  —

  IN THE northern thicket, Mousseau was scanning for the Special Forces soldier when he heard someone calling out softly yet urgently, “Leroy! Leroy!”

  “Who is that?” Mousseau called back.

  “It’s Benavidez,” Roy answered. “I’m coming in.”

  Roy crawled through the trampled grass into the blood-soaked perimeter, up to Mousseau who was propped between a CIDG body and the roots of a small tree; a few yards away, Bao and two more CIDG were prone at their weapons. Wiping blood from his eyes—his face had taken shrapnel from the RPG blast—Roy examined Mousseau’s bandage then pulled up his own pant leg to find that a bullet had passed completely through his calf.

  “Where’s the rest of the team?” he asked, and Mousseau nodded toward the other thicket. “Okay,” said Roy, “let me have your radio. We’re getting out of here.”

  A moment later, FAC Tornow, Yurman, the Greyhounds, the Mad Dogs, the fighter-bomber pilots—all the personnel who had been fighting to keep the team alive on the ground and everybody else who had been monitoring the deteriorating situation from afar—were surprised to hear a new voice on the ground. He identified himself with the call sign Tango Mike Mike and reported he was with the team.

  “They’re in bad shape down here,” Roy said. “Multiple wounded. Request immediate medevac.”