by Dennis Foley
She summarized much of the news that he never got. The press had been having a field day with their interpretations of the successes of the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive.
Hollister’s understanding was that while there were considerable successes politically and a great body of world public opinion had been swayed, the numbers of dead VC and North Vietnamese spoke to him as a huge failure.
He tried to remember the difference he often saw between what was happening before his eyes and how it was reported and colored in the American press. That factor considered, he could quickly see how it would upset Susan. He started drafting a reply in his head, cautioning himself not to start defending the actions in Vietnam to his own wife and further polarize what was now a workable difference of opinion over the war.
Susan had never demanded that he get out of the army. She understood that he loved the people he worked with and felt he was doing something important. She knew the frustrations, too. She knew he was worried about his potential in the real world after the army if he got out and his potential for advancement if he stayed.
Hollister had felt the pressure to get to and through college as fast as possible. The difficulty involved going to night school when he was so often moved from station to station, overseas and back to the States. He had been moved to new assignments ten times since he had entered the army. At that rate, he had racked up eleven incompletes on his college transcript.
Her letters brought on more tension in the base of his neck, and he poured himself another drink without thinking about what he was doing.
Her words soon changed to how much she missed him. He knew she would be lonely in a big-city sense, moving back to New York, but she just couldn’t bring herself to remain in Columbus, Georgia, after she was pushed out of army quarters with his departure.
He was beginning to realize how his attitude had changed about New York. He had loved it as a place to visit when he was on leave as an enlisted man. He had even enjoyed it when he and Susan had spent time in her flat in the Village and gone out on the town. But he felt different about her being there as his wife without him. God, how he missed her.
Over a particularly filling breakfast of creamed beef on toast, coffee, and very bitter grapefruit, Hollister looked at the roster the first sergeant had handed him.
“The Old Man wanted me to run it by you. It was the only thing we could do to keep the reassignments down,” Morrison said, gnawing on a dry piece of unbuffered toast.
“Not thrilling,” Hollister said.
“The toast or the roster?”
“The roster,” Hollister said, looking up. He saw the dry toast and made a face. “I’ll bet that wasn’t what vaulted you out of bed this morning.”
“No, sir. It pretty much screams for something like butter or jam.” He leaned back and patted his stomach. “But I’m determined to get rid of my new call sign.”
“What’s that?”
“I got wind that the troops are calling me ‘First Sergeant Heavy Drop.’ I don’t know how many pounds I’ve lost, but I’m making some serious progress on my web belt,” Morrison said, pulling the tail of his belt out, displaying the crimp marks exposed on the free end.
“Looks to me like you’re doing the job, Top,” Hollister said.
“Thanks. I guess all that time in headquarters jobs got away from me. Never again!”
“The weight bother you?”
“No, sir—the morning runs do,” Morrison said, breaking into a broad grin.
They both laughed, and Hollister slid the roster back to Morrison. “Well, it looks like you did what you had to here. How many people have been reassigned to different teams?”
“Moving six pretty much consolidated what we had and gave us the most full-strength teams. But three of those moved had only been with their old teams for less than a month.”
“Okay. I’ll see what I can do to make them feel more comfortable about the turbulence. It’s a real confidence-buster for LRPs to be moved from team to team.”
The area was as close as they could get to being totally secure and not being inside the wire of an American base camp. They needed to practice inserts and extractions as a full-dress rehearsal, complete with live fire. The Field Force, the ARVN district chief, and the local village chiefs had cleared the area for Hollister to use. Still, he wanted to recon it first before off-loading troops onto innocent civilians or waiting VC.
The ride out was a boyish thrill for Hollister. Jack Stanton wanted to fly the mission and had a Cobra that needed a maintenance check flight to confirm some blade-tracking error that had been adjusted earlier in the day.
Stanton and Hollister climbed into the Cobra on the Old Warrior Pad. “You can do everything from the front seat that I can do back here plus some,” Stanton said as they spooled up to takeoff rpm.
“Kinda tight,” Hollister said, having just compacted his six-foot frame into the copilot’s narrow seat in front of and below Stanton’s.
“It’s an aviator’s dream. Something tight that flies and shoots fire and brimstone.”
“I’ve been in more comfortable places,” Hollister said, trying to wiggle into a better position.
“Yeah, but you’ve never been in a more beautiful rotary-wing flying machine,” Stanton said, reaching over to flip the radio to the control-tower frequency at the Cu Chi airfield. “Stand by, Jim. Let me clear us outa here.”
Hollister clicked the mike button on the floor with his boot twice to let Stanton know he understood. He then adjusted his shoulder restraints, the chest protector he had strapped on before getting in, and the lip mike attached to his flight helmet.
While he made the adjustments, he heard Stanton talk to the local traffic controller, get clearance, and get wind and barometric readings.
“Okay, up there. Let’s get this thing up to a cooler altitude,” Stanton said.
“No shit,” Hollister said over the intercom. “I never expected it to be this hot in here.”
“You close up this Plexiglas with nothing to shade you and the temperature runs up faster than your tail rotor rpm. Don’t worry about it. When we get in the air, it’ll cool down a lot.”
The initial sensation was much like being in the front car on a roller coaster. Hollister watched Stanton’s control moves by noticing the changes on the cyclic and collective pitch controls up front. Whatever Stanton did with his in the backseat was mirrored on the controls inches from Hollister’s fingertips.
It may have only been Hollister’s perception, but nose-down altitude taking off in a Cobra seemed much more exaggerated than the same takeoff in a Huey. For a few seconds Hollister felt as if Stanton were going to turn the chopper over on its top. But as fast as Stanton dropped the nose and pulled up the collective, the chopper seemed to leap up off the ground and translate its upward motion into forward motion. “Jeeeeezus!” Hollister said, almost under his breath.
“You got a lot less drag with a three-foot-wide chopper than you do with a Huey that flies like a footlocker with skids.”
“It sure seems to have more punch!”
“Three hundred more shaft horsepower than a slick.”
The chopper skimmed over the concentric circles of concertina, double-apron barbed wire and neatly spaced perimeter bunkers. Troops on the ground looked up and waved at the Cobra.
“When was the last time you saw a grunt smile at a chopper like it’s September and they just rolled out the new Corvettes?”
“I can see them. Is it the speed?”
“I think it’s the look. A snake looks bad. But the fact is that we can hit at two hundred and twenty miles an hour while a slick is lucky to get near a hundred an’ a half on a good day.”
“This could sure make a grunt like me think about flight school.”
“Hey, we don’t want smelly old infantrymen falling in love with the magic of Cobra flying—just women, my friend. Just women,” Stanton kidded.
As they headed out toward the training area, Stant
on couldn’t resist showing off his new toy for Hollister. He pushed the cyclic forward, causing Hollister’s stomach to rise as the chopper sank toward the rice fields. Within seconds they were slamming along the ground barely inches over the highest paddy dikes. The dikes clicked by like muddy railroad ties.
It quickly became clear to Hollister as they screamed toward a stand of trees that Stanton would have to commit himself to a turn or more altitude—very soon. At a point where Hollister almost guessed it was too late to keep from crashing into the trees, Stanton jerked the nose up and started a climb that appeared to be almost straight up.
There were only a few things Hollister understood about flying, but the concept of stalling was one of them. As they gained altitude, the powerful turbine engine began to lose the battle against gravity. It was a very disconcerting feeling for Hollister. He was sure Stanton probably knew what he was doing. But what would happen at the top of the stall? Would they simply fall backward out of the sky? Tail down? What would it do to the rotor blades?
Not able to resist any longer, Hollister spoke up. “What happens now?”
“This!” Stanton said. Just as the aircraft seemed to come to a virtual standstill in the sky, Stanton kicked hard on the right pedal, spinning the chopper in a right yaw until it was suddenly facing straight down. And then the second half of the roller-coaster ride began. The chopper began to fall as it picked up speed; then it fell even faster.
As the chopper rocketed toward the rice fields, Hollister tried to gauge the time before Stanton would have to begin pulling out of the dive. In seconds they passed that point and Hollister again had to wonder what Stanton and the Cobra had in store for him. He glanced down at the airspeed indicator and had to look at it twice. The air rushing into the stingerlike pitot tube on the chopper’s nose was pegging the hand on the ASI.
Hollister knew he was flying with a crazy man, and would surely die before the sweep second hand on his watch made another revolution.
At a point that just had to be too low, Stanton drew back the cyclic, corrected the pedal to compensate for the countertorque, and pulled the chopper out of the dive in a shuddering change of direction—from almost straight down to straight and level.
“This is where I get off!” Hollister teased Stanton, half serious.
“Aw hell, a little chopper ride couldn’t scare an Airborne-Ranger-LRP, could it?”
“No… But that was not like any little chopper ride I’ve ever been on.”
“The AH-IG Cobra is not any little chopper, either,” Stanton countered.
“I’m a believer up here. But I feel like the front bumper in a demo derby.”
They both laughed as Stanton snapped the chopper up on its side to thread it between two tall trees that were too close together for the forty-four-foot diameter rotor disk to squeeze between them.
“Man, this is some machine!”
“It’s a sports car for aviators.”
“I’m sold.”
“Oh, wait until you see this thing shoot. I ain’t the best shot in the west, but I can knock the chin whiskers off a frog at max range doing a couple hundred knots with anything onboard.”
“What’s onboard?” Hollister asked.
“This one’s rigged with two six-barrel 7.62 miniguns in the chin turret—each firing four thousand rounds. And, on the little, stubby wing stations I’ve got rocket pods that’ll fire one to nineteen pairs of rockets at a time.”
“Pairs?” Hollister asked.
“Yep, pairs. One off each side. If I do it right, they converge out there ahead of us right where the bad guys are.”
Hollister had decided that he liked Stanton and was growing confident in his flying, as well as getting comfortable with his sense of humor. “We sure are glad to have you guys on our team.”
“Well, you better take care of us. You know what we had to give up back at Bien Hoa to come out here and live in the fuckin’ boonies?” Stanton asked.
“I’ll bet you’re gonna tell me.”
“I’ll tell you now and remind you often. We had enough booze to swim in, women of all types and colors, clean sheets washed by hooch maids, and air conditioning. And that is only the beginning of the list. Back at Battalion we had a club with the fanciest card room in Vietnam, naked girls dancing on the bar, great stereo equipment, and transportation to houses of ill repute from Long Binh to Saigon. Hell, we even got regular trips to the R and R beach at Vung Tau.”
“I’ll bet you like it here better, huh?”
“I’d rather have hemorrhoids than be made to go back there.”
They both laughed.
Stanton began a long, lazy descending left turn. “Well, here’s your training area,” he announced.
Hollister pulled his map up from its place, tightly tucked under his thigh against the seat. He looked out and generally oriented himself on the low profile of the Saigon skyline eighteen miles off to the east.
Cross-checking the chopper compass and then making a quick adjustment of his map, Hollister was sure he had himself oriented on the terrain.
His map had a black grease-pencil line that marked the limits of the area he had cleared, notes on the nearest friendly units, the training frequencies and call signs, and the proposed LZs and PZs he wanted to use.
“What do you say we have a closer look at the tree line near the landing zone?” Stanton asked.
“I’d like that. I don’t need any surprises when we get in here,” Hollister said.
Stanton rolled the Cobra over in a hard right turn, slipped from two hundred feet to treetop level, and ran down the length of the tree line closest to the fallow paddies they were planning on using.
As much as his shoulder harness would allow, Hollister leaned forward to look over the chopper’s nose at the ground. Stanton eased back on the cyclic, slowed the airspeed to under five knots, and rolled it in a small circle, causing the rotor wash to blow the trees around. By doing that the tree branches moved in several directions, not allowing anything under them to be hidden from view.
“Man! You don’t miss a thing doing this,” Hollister said, surprised at the visibility.
“Yeah. And the lower and slower you get, the more it rattles anybody you flush out. You’re more likely to get shot at by someone five hundred meters away than someone less than thirty feet below you.”
They eased along the full length of the row of trees and looked over every piece of ground they revealed by blowing away the branches, bushes, and tall grasses. The ground showed plenty of evidence of use. There was a small trail, no more than a foot wide, that ran down the center of the windbreak. The lack of growth on it was an indication that it was used often. But Hollister knew use didn’t necessarily mean that those walking the path were VC.
At one end of the trees was a small bunker that appeared to have one part of the overhead cover caved in. “Ho! You see that bunker?”
Stanton clicked his mike button twice and pulled the chopper off to the right and then back to the left, starting a slow left turn around the entire bunker. The maneuver gave him a better view out the left side of the chopper so he didn’t have to look over the top of his instruments and Hollister’s head at the spot on the ground.
The bunker had been built to house two to three soldiers. There was a small access hole on the back and a small six-inch firing aperture on the opposite side.
As they turned over the bunker, Hollister could see that the aperture had excellent observation of the football-field-sized paddy in front of it. With a simple light machine gun, an enemy soldier would level an entire LRP team stepping out of a chopper almost anywhere on the landing zone.
Even though the bunker was old and empty, it showed Hollister the awareness the local guerrillas had and the effort they would go to to kill Americans.
“Want me to fire it up?” Stanton asked.
“No. I think I want to leave it there for a training aid. Come left a little.”
Stanton came to a hover and star
ted to crab sideways over the bunker.
“There! See it?”
“What you got?”
“See the bottom?” Hollister asked.
Stanton slipped sideways a bit more and stopped at a solid hover. “Yeah, I got it. I can see the water and the weeds down in there. I guess it really hasn’t been used in months.”
“Let’s leave it be and let the troops discover it.”
“Okay with me. You’re the boss here.”
As Stanton rolled the chopper over to the right, Hollister made a note on the bunker’s location and tried to estimate the fan of visibility and fire a gunner would have from inside. On the map he made a large V across the rice paddy with the apex at the bunker’s firing aperture. As he checked outside the chopper for the orientation of the V, he was more impressed and surprised by the degree of vulnerability facing anyone standing in the large pie-shaped area.
They flew on and made the same low-level recon of all the terrain features in the immediate area that might present a threat to the safety of the troops who would use it starting that afternoon.
The other clumps and outcroppings offered no more indication of recent use than they had seen in the first stand of trees. That left only the landing zone itself.
“Can we take a closer look at the area between the touchdown point and the nearest cover?” Hollister asked.
“No problem,” Stanton said. He eased the chopper over into a right turn and dropped down to an altitude only inches above the weed-filled field.
“This is it. Can we work from here to the trees—looking for anything unpleasant on the ground?”
“Make you a deal,” Stanton said. “You check out the ground, and I’ll keep my head up and watch our ass. At this speed and altitude I’m a juicy target. I’d just as soon be ready to render a ballsy gook gunner into smoking paste.”