Legend

by Eric Blehm

  He looked over to the adjacent thicket and spotted O’Connor. “You okay?” he shouted.

  “Ammo?!” O’Connor yelled.

  “Who’s alive?!”

  Chien had been killed, leaving just O’Connor and Tuan. He raised two fingers. “We’re going out!” Roy yelled back. “Try and get over here!”

  Tuan was semiconscious when O’Connor told him they were getting out. “We gotta move,” he urged, but Tuan was too weak from blood loss to do anything but lie there. “Don’t leave me here,” he pleaded.

  “I won’t,” O’Connor assured him. “Let’s go.” O’Connor began to slide forward on his side, guarding his stomach wound, while physically pushing the interpreter in advance of him—a few painful inches at a time. A slick passed overhead—either McKibben or Ewing targeting the enemy with long bursts of fire that were lost in the steady reports of the AK-47 fire, larger-caliber machine-gun fire, and mortar rounds.

  A few more inches and O’Connor faced the gap between the thickets where the first two CIDG had fallen hours earlier. Machine-gun fire raked across his path, and Roy waved him back.

  As Roy threw a smoke grenade, O’Connor squirmed backward to the modest but effective cover of the anthill, pulling Tuan with him. “Don’t leave me here,” Tuan said again. “Don’t leave me.”

  —

  GREYHOUND ONE was providing cover fire over the PZ when McKibben heard Roy say, “Identify smoke.”

  “I see green smoke,” McKibben replied. He came in fast over the treetops and flared to a hover a few yards west of the northern thicket—placing his slick between the team and the western tree line, where the heaviest concentrations of enemy fire were coming from.

  The rotor wash turned the thick, billowing green smoke into a swirling haze. Gunfire erupted from the clearing’s edge, and Fournier answered from the right side of the helicopter, steadily firing rounds from his M60 at knee- to chest-level—a horizontal line of protective lead into the tangle of charred, napalmed jungle. A second slick, Ewing’s, came in a hundred feet off the deck, closer still to the trees, drawing some fire while his right-door gunner strafed even deeper into the vegetation.

  Roy stayed crouched in the thin cover of the thicket beside Mousseau and his CIDG, all wounded. He picked up an AK-47, likely the one Mousseau had retrieved from one of the dead, and then—under the temporary cover offered by Greyhound One’s door gunners, Roy said, “Let’s go!” In a hunched-over run, he ushered Mousseau, Bao, and the other two CIDG toward the helicopter. They limped and dragged their way toward the open door of the slick as Roy stood beside the skids, covering them until the final man had heaved himself on board. Then Roy signaled to McKibben, directing him to the other thicket.

  Holding Greyhound One steady, its skids a couple of feet off the ground, McKibben gently nosed down and crept forward while Roy jogged alongside, firing into the southern tree line. They got as close to the thicket as possible—some twenty feet away—and Christensen had a clear line of fire in the ten and eleven o’clock of the southern tree line. Anything that moved, he hit.

  Roy darted the distance and dove down beside O’Connor, leaning up against the base of the anthill. Tuan was six feet farther down the berm-like hill, and a few feet farther still was Leroy Wright’s body.

  “Can you walk?” Roy asked O’Connor.

  “I can crawl,” O’Connor said, then gestured to Tuan, who had fallen unconscious again. “He can’t.”

  “What does Leroy have on him?”

  “The SOI [standard operating instructions] and some maps in a green plastic pouch tucked in his shirt.”

  Noticing that O’Connor carried only a .22 pistol, Roy handed him the AK-47. “Cover me,” he said, and crawled through the grass to Wright’s body.

  Unbuttoning and reaching inside his friend’s shirt, he pulled out the pouch of sensitive material. Wright’s camera bulged in his chest pocket, and he took that as well. Hearing movement, Roy quickly crawled back to Tuan, grabbed two grenades from his web gear, pulled the pins, and tossed them into the tall grass just beyond Wright’s body. Two NVA jumped up to run, but the grenades exploded and took both men down.

  Slapping Tuan’s face, Roy was able to revive him enough to get him to move over to O’Connor, with Roy pushing from behind. Roy retrieved his weapon from O’Connor and explained that the helicopter could not get any closer because of the trees. “You’re going to have to crawl,” he said, then crouched low, turned his back on O’Connor and Tuan, and returned to Wright’s body, where he dropped to his knees. He was determined to bring Leroy back to his wife and his two boys, whose drawings he had seen taped to his locker at Ho Ngoc Tao, with the word Daddy scribbled in crayon at the top.

  Tears were rolling down his cheeks, Roy realized, but there was no time to mourn—the pitch of Greyhound One’s engine was already getting higher, screaming as it hovered impatiently. O’Connor and Tuan were almost to the slick’s door, and a CIDG reached out to help them aboard. Roy worked his arms under Wright’s body—prepared to drag Wright to the slick if he couldn’t lift his 200-plus pounds up onto his shoulders—when something slammed into him so hard it pitched him forward, knocking the wind out of him. A bullet, the third he had taken in the half hour he’d been on the ground, had entered his back, exiting beneath his left armpit.

  There was a heat that came with the impact, as though he’d been touched by fire, run through by a red-hot spear that ignited his insides. And then, the explosion.

  —

  ON GREYHOUND Two’s second pass across the PZ, Ewing’s door gunners expended the rest of their ammunition. Greyhound One was still hovering beside the thicket. The green uniforms of the enemy speckled the woods around the clearing, their numbers increasing by the minute.

  “Mac, come on, man, you’ve been down too long!” Ewing said over the radio.

  “Larry, get the hell out of there!” Yurman cut in.

  As calmly as if he were picking up some buddies to go to a movie, McKibben replied, “Yeah, they’re just getting them on board now. Be done in a minute…”

  Tornow had dropped in altitude and was in a wide observation bank, putting his binoculars to his eyes periodically to monitor the extraction, when he saw an NVA soldier run out from the tree line and unload his AK-47 into Greyhound One’s cockpit. He watched helplessly as Greyhound One “spun awkwardly…almost in slow motion…the blades slicing the trees, and in a moment it lay in a twisted shambles on the ground.”

  Greyhound Two had banked out over the jungle for another pass, and Ewing was contemplating whether he should hover directly on top of Greyhound One to draw fire when he heard McKibben key his mic and expel a soft groan, almost like an exhale.

  “Mac! Mac! You okay?!” asked Ewing, streaking back over the clearing. He saw the wreckage at once, the dust still hanging in the air, and he knew that his friend and wingman, Larry McKibben, was dead.

  Oh God Oh God Oh God, what happened? he thought. Did my hesitation kill him? Oh, please no! I was going in! I swear I was going in! He cut me off. Oh, Larry, man, f—k! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! It should have been me!

  —

  A MOMENT before, Tornow had been cautiously hopeful that his twelve men, dead and alive, were coming home. Now he was hit with the despair of having both the Special Forces team and a slick crew trapped in the PZ, with the enemy emerging from the trees all around. The main body of the slick was nosed over on its right side, the tail boom broken and separated from the fuselage, lying in the grass. Bodies were dumped out on the ground beside the wreckage, the wounded attempting to crawl away. Through his binoculars, Tornow could see McKibben was slumped in his seat, motionless.

  Yurman watched Greyhound Two making a slow, low pass over the clearing and knew his door gunners were unloading on the NVA in the open. He would not allow another helicopter to be shot down.

  “Do not attempt extraction, Greyho
und Two,” Yurman ordered Ewing. Greyhound Two’s gunners reported they were out of ammo; the helicopter’s fuel was nearly at bingo. Turning the slick’s nose east, Ewing gained altitude and headed back to Quan Loi to rearm and refuel.

  “Mac, you copying this?” Yurman continued to radio. “Anybody on Greyhound One, you copy?”

  Tornow, too, was trying to reach anyone on the ground. He prepped his fast movers, even as he received only a long, deafening silence.

  —

  WHEN O’CONNOR came to, he heard “a steady hissing sound, like steam escaping.” Then he felt someone going through the rucksack on his back.

  “Radio, radio,” said a CIDG from Mousseau’s team. Confused, O’Connor rolled over and saw the slick about ten feet away, pitched over, nearly on its side.

  Roy, his face bloody, the left side of his shirt soaked with blood, was at the right door, which was angled toward the ground, pulling the crew and team members out of the crumpled rear cabin. McKibben and Fournier were dead—McKibben from a bullet to the head and severe abdominal wounds, Fournier crushed by the transmission. Some survivors were dazed and lay sprawled motionless on the grass; others rallied around Mousseau, who sat low beneath the tail boom. Meanwhile, the slick was taking so many hits from enemy fire that it sounded like a tin can at a gun range—not a good sign, given the overwhelming stink of jet fuel and burning oil.

  O’Connor called out to Roy, who turned to look at him. “You okay, O’Connor?” he asked.

  “I think so,” O’Connor replied.

  Sending a slightly wounded CIDG in O’Connor’s direction, Roy said, “Form a perimeter.” He pointed at a slender, wispy tree beyond the front of the helicopter, growing beside a mound of earth—what was left of the anthill. Its top had been gouged off when Greyhound One’s main rotor plowed into it during the crash. They were back where they started.

  “I need ammo and a weapon,” O’Connor said.

  “The chopper’s gonna blow,” Roy said. “Move out! Get weapons and ammo from the dead.”

  Mousseau, along with Greyhound One’s copilot, William Fernan, Bao, and another CIDG crawled away from the tail boom back to the northern thicket, while O’Connor, Tuan, and the remaining CIDG moved toward the anthill.

  “O’Connor!” Roy yelled. “Do you have a radio?”

  With the help of the CIDG, O’Connor was able to retrieve two emergency radios from his pack and another from Tuan’s rucksack.

  —

  THE NVA were either terrible shots or they were focusing all their efforts on the slick, because somehow Roy, Fernan, Bao, and the two CIDG were able to scavenge the dead NVA close to their original perimeter, each yielding a weapon.

  Ammunition, however, was scarce. “Single shots!” Roy told them. “No auto.” He pointed out the designated field of fire each was responsible for. “Save your bullets,” he said. He crawled over to O’Connor and retrieved a radio. “I’ll come back in a few minutes. I’ll call the tac air closer.”

  Taking in the scene around him, O’Connor saw that Roy had organized the remnants of a nearly destroyed recon team and slick crew “into a force to be reckoned with,” he wrote in his statement years later. “Seriously wounded, he crawled around, constantly under fire, and gave tactical orders, took charge of air support, medical aid, ammunition and…saw to it that we positioned ourselves in a way that would increase our chances of survival, inflict maximum casualties on the enemy, and secure the PZ against almost impossible odds.”

  O’Connor felt the fight that had been lost in him coming back. It was Roy’s “courage, actions, words, and coolness” that did it, he would write. “He boosted our morale, giving us the will to fight and live.”

  Still, they were a battered group, almost out of ammunition, and the downed helicopter was like blood in the water, emboldening the NVA to move in and finish them off.

  13

  LAST CHANCE

  O’CONNOR LAY ON his side, watching his designated field of fire through the torn-up grass. Unable to scavenge a weapon from the dead, he was armed only with his suppressed .22 caliber pistol and an old World War II–era bayonet he’d picked up in Fayetteville, near Fort Bragg. The bayonet was the perfect commo tool—for cutting and spooling wire, as a screwdriver or hammer or even a crowbar—but that and a .22 pistol would do little against the numerous enemy he could make out thirty or forty yards distant, seemingly milling around in the tree line. Other NVA were slowly, but increasingly boldly, working their way toward them and the helicopter wreckage. His immediate thought was that these soldiers must consider them easy prey, that they’d move in and capture or kill the American and South Vietnamese puppet soldiers stunned from the crash.

  Suddenly, a man appeared near O’Connor’s position. In a single moment, he identified the soldier as NVA and made the decision to play dead, allowing the enemy to move closer and closer until he was just above O’Connor. The soldier looked down and O’Connor lifted his pistol and fired four or five shots into his chest.

  Stripping the man of his AK-47, ammunition, and canteen, O’Connor then lugged the body onto its side to use as a sandbag.

  Apparently aware that the survivors had left the downed slick, the NVA shifted the bulk of their fire from the wreckage to the area around it, including the two thickets. RPGs ripped across the PZ at grass height, and mortars whistled down toward their positions, with explosions that heaved up earth and sent burning shrapnel into their midst.

  O’Connor rose up, just high enough to locate Roy, who was himself low in the grass and on the radio in the other thicket. There was a bullet hole through the emergency radio O’Connor took from his belt and held in his hand. He turned it on anyway and found that he could receive but not transmit. Holding the radio close to his ear, he monitored Roy’s transmissions as he identified targets for Tornow and communicated directly with the gunship pilots.

  It was just shy of 4:00 p.m., and the gunships, alternating their runs with F-100 Super Sabres, F4 Phantoms, and A-37 Cessnas, continued to pound both the clearing and the tree line surrounding it. But for every swath of decimated jungle, a different section would light up with barrel flashes and tracers, revealing another NVA rifle team, sniper, or platoon, all being skillfully maneuvered to maintain pressure on the Americans and CIDG in the PZ.

  The foliage around the PZ was so thinned out by the devastation that the outlines of bunkers and defensive positions had become visible from the air, hinting at the true scope of the enemy’s strength. “It was a shock,” says Paul LaChance, crew chief on Mad Dog Three. “These weren’t fighting positions they just threw together; there were permanent bunkers. I saw at least two bunkers—and if I could see two, there were more. Later, when we debriefed, I was thinking this had to have been the outer defenses for a regiment, maybe even a division. Not hundreds of troops, but thousands. If not right there, they were nearby and getting trucked in.”

  —

  CREW CHIEF Dan Christensen came groggily to his senses in a world that was sideways and shaking so violently he couldn’t see straight. He was lying in the grass, and the trees in the jungle around him were coming out of the ground, with exploding bark and branches and dirt flying everywhere as if a tornado were touching down. He saw the debris from the helicopter and smelled the smoke and burnt oil and remembered—McKibben was dead, and so was Fournier, but what about Fernan? Was he still in the wreckage? They’re going to blow it up…. I gotta move.

  He tried to open his mouth, but it was locked up, his jawbone cracked in half in the crash. His pant legs were dark, soaked with blood from where he’d been hit by bullets or shrapnel. He reached for the sidearm on his hip, but the holster was empty. Where’s my pistol? he thought, trying to wriggle himself up. Then what looked like a “human ketchup bottle” moved toward him, a Special Forces soldier whose face, hands, chest, neck, arms, and legs were covered in coagulating, black, caked-on, and smeared blood: Roy Be
navidez.

  Roy motioned for Christensen to stay down. Pointing up with one hand, a radio in the other, Roy signaled that help was incoming. Christensen gave Roy a thumbs-up. Dropping his chest to the ground, Roy used his elbows to move through the grass toward O’Connor’s group, staying as low as possible as O’Connor and the CIDG provided cover. Roy jerked suddenly to one side, but kept moving.

  Roy’s radio was still in his hand when he reached O’Connor. “How bad you hit?” O’Connor asked, and Roy replied, “I don’t know. I think just a flesh wound. I’m fine. How are you guys holding up?”

  “Me and Tuan, we’re in bad shape.” He motioned to the CIDG. “This guy is wounded but holding his own. We’re all going easy on the ammo.”

  “Save it for anybody coming through there,” Roy said, indicating the intersection where the cart trail entered the clearing to their west.

  With the help of the CIDG, Roy and O’Connor rolled the bodies of dead NVA and CIDG, using them as sandbags to fortify their position. As they pulled another body back from the tall grass, intense fire and a fusillade of RPGs hit them. The CIDG clutched his stomach. Roy grabbed his own leg, dragged the wounded man back with him to the perimeter, and urgently asked O’Connor for the radio.

  The heavy automatic-weapons fire picked up. O’Connor reached behind him and brought his hand back, covered in fresh blood—he had caught a large metal fragment above his left kidney. He was in so much pain, he couldn’t talk and was on the verge of passing out; the CIDG beside him was moaning, his hands pushed against his stomach.

  Spotting the radio beneath O’Connor’s legs, Roy grabbed it and tried to make contact. Its batteries were very weak. He clutched it tightly against his ear, listening for a response, but could hear nothing above the explosions and automatic-weapons fire.

  —

  MAD DOG Four had barely touched down at Quan Loi when Pete Gailis and his gunner, Danny Clark, jumped out to refuel and rearm their gunship for the third time that day.