by Dennis Foley
The delays put the team out forty minutes late. Fortunately, there was enough slack in the plan to allow for the delay and still get both teams in before first light—if neither team made contact on the way in.
By the time the second team was in and had reported that the LZ was cold, the C&C only had about forty minutes of fuel left. The gunships had even less.
Hollister decided to send the gunships back to refuel and use the C&C to begin searching for trails in the wet grasses even before the sun started coming up.
Edmonds turned the chopper away from the more populated center and eastern part of Hau Nghia Province toward the Cambodian border.
“Why don’t we swing down south toward the Parrot’s Beak and then turn back north, putting the sunrise in their eyes and letting us fly at low level into the wind?” Hollister suggested.
“Zactly what I was thinking. You sure you haven’t got aviator blood in your veins?” Edmonds replied playfully.
“You sure are chipper at this time of the morning,” Hollister said.
“Hey, I got ’leven-hundred horsepower under my ass, two great door gunners, a peter pilot who can read a map with the best of them. What could possibly be the problem?”
Hollister looked at his watch. “My watch says it’s still night out. Isn’t that enough?”
“Naw. Every time I think of what life is like in a rifle company, an advisory job, or working in one of those fucked headquarters in Saigon, Long Binh, or Nha Trang, I get to likin’ army aviation more and more.”
“You guys must have to fail some kind of test to get into flight school,” Hollister countered.
“Naw, we just have to be smarter than your average mud grunt.”
Some giggling came over the intercom, and Hollister turned around to look at the door gunner, who suddenly made it look as if he were busy checking his M60.
Edmonds reached a point near the apex of the Parrot’s Beak and made a hard turn back to the north. At the same time he dropped the collective, and the chopper seemed to fall as if it were floating toward the ground. At about two hundred feet, he pulled power back into the blade and leveled off.
“Heads up!” the copilot said, pointing off to the west out the left side of the windscreen.
“What the hell is that?” Edmonds said.
“Lights! No … vehicle lights … Jeezus! There must be a hundred of them!” Edmonds said.
Hollister pulled out his map and tried to find landmarks in the dark. The two small streams that ran near the border were too hard for him to pick out. He looked over his shoulder toward the glow of Saigon’s lights on the horizon and then looked back down. He spotted the long, straight, and distinctive canal that ran parallel to the Cambodian border, just east of the village of Ba Thu.
“Looks like they are lined up north and west of Ba Thu itself,” he said.
“That puts them just about a half a kilometer on the other side of the fence,” Edmonds said.
“Shit!” Hollister said. “The fuckers are probably off-loading troops and supplies, telling them to walk toward Saigon.”
The sun was starting to transform the blackness to a blue and pink dawn. The drivers were turning their lights off. “You suppose they’re dumping their lights because of the chopper?” the copilot asked.
“No. They know we can’t fire on them. They’re probably just through using the lights now that it’s almost sunup,” Edmonds said.
Right in front of Hollister, about twenty meters out, two large puffs of black smoke appeared with muffled cracks. For a moment he didn’t know what he was looking at. Each puff of smoke was half the size of the chopper and stood still in the sky once it appeared.
“Oh fuck! Triple A!” Edmonds yelled over the intercom as he nosed over the chopper, headed toward the rice paddies, and picked up airspeed.
“What?” Hollister asked.
Two more rounds burst next to and slightly behind the chopper.
“Thirty-seven-millimeter antiaircraft guns. We were told they had some out here. If they hit us, we’re meat.”
“Can you evade them?”
“I can outrun them. We can fly faster than they can track. Least that’s the theory. If I can get the airspeed up, we can run out from under their reach.”
Hollister held his breath and watched the 37mm rounds burst in the air just behind the chopper. Once Edmonds got the airspeed up to eighty-five knots, it seemed that the air bursts were shorter and shorter in their attempts to hit the chopper.
“I think you did it,” Hollister said. He pinned his map to his seat by folding it once and tucking it under his hip. He reached into his claymore bag and pulled out his GI-issue binoculars. Putting them to his eyes, he scanned the horizon just inside the invisible Cambodian border, looking for the AAA site. “Did anyone get a location on the weapon?”
The two pilots and the two door gunners all said no.
“You think we can get some artillery or TacAir in there?” Edmonds asked.
“I doubt they’ll clear it since we can’t ID a target.”
“The guns just checked in. They’re in orbit over Hiep Hoa and want to know what the hell we’re doing—trolling?” Edmonds said.
“Okay,” Hollister said. “Let’s get some ground searching done as soon as I call all this in. Guess we’ll have to pick a stretch of open area a little farther from the border.”
“You got that right,” Edmonds said. “I’m gonna need a change of underwear after that.”
The emotion wasn’t Edmonds’s alone. Hollister still felt his heart beating up in his neck. He could only imagine what one of the 37mm rounds could do to the thin skin of a Huey if it burst close enough. There was no doubt that it would bring down a chopper with a half-lucky shot. He looked at his watch. It wasn’t even sunup yet, and he had already pumped enough adrenaline on the two inserts and the 37mm to fill a bathtub. He reached into his shirt pocket for a cigarette.
Lighting a cigarette in the rotor-washed open cargo door of the Huey was a trick he had learned early on in his first tour. But smoking in a chopper was a routine more than a sensation. The wind was so pervasive that the smoke itself was dissipated as quickly as it left the smoker. So there was little evidence he was smoking except for the burning in his throat and lungs. Still, Hollister needed the cigarette.
Passing on the information about the trucks and the 37mm position took only a few minutes, but at that point it all came to a complete halt. None of this surprised Hollister. After only a short time in III Corps he had become accustomed to the NIH attitude—not invented here.
He had discovered that most supporting units and headquarters didn’t think too many ideas, reports of targets of opportunities, or suggestions were any good unless they came from within. Anyone else’s ideas or requests were looked upon as if they were more of an inconvenience than a chance to do something about the war.
So Hollister was not too surprised when the air force said that it would only fly a FAC out to the area to try to develop a target for fast movers and the artillery denied clearance to fire until an exact target was found. The air force added that it would have to find a FAC that was not already committed for the day since its day was just beginning and all flyable resources were put against known targets or operations. To Hollister that translated as hold your breath.
The politics involving the border always pissed him off. It wasn’t the first time he had seen enemy units massed only meters on the other side of the Cambodian and Laotian borders just thumbing their noses at the Americans.
The search for new trails began late. Hollister braced himself for any unknown eventuality as Edmonds dropped out of the sky to a search altitude of a little more than a hundred feet. His path was still south to north, as they hoped to intersect the trail of trampled weeds, rice, and grasses any infiltrator would leave heading into South Vietnam.
All eyes in the chopper were on the reeds and grasses that were clipping by at over fifty knots. Birds were flushed from their nests, a
nd random waterfowl elected to dive for safety or dash for the concealment the vegetation offered.
The search immediately got easier when the sun broke the horizon and cast long shadows from east to west, as this helped provide another dimension to the weeds, reeds, and grasses. With the sun throwing the shadows, the breaks in the texture were immediately visible. Most of the trails were from small animals and the occasional beaten-down pattern caused by flocks of cranes and egrets that had landed, fed, and flown away.
“We’ve only got about twenty minutes of go-juice left in this thing,” Edmonds said.
“Gotcha,” Hollister replied. “Let’s stay with it and change our course to the northeast so we’ll be searching while we’re heading for the barn.”
“Rog,” Edmonds said as he gently changed the direction of flight, causing the chopper to bank slightly to the right.
Trees, intermittent streams, abandoned rice fields, clumps of trees, wild manioc growth, and endless vines and weeds snapped by beneath the skids. Hollister started to wonder if the idea of looking for trails was any good. Maybe the infiltrators were walking the streambeds, staying on the hard paths on top of the dikes, or using small skiffs to weave through the streams, canals, and deeply flooded paddies.
“Whoa! Live one,” someone hollered over the intercom.
Immediately, Edmonds jerked the nose of the chopper up, almost stalling out. Then he laid it over to the right to make a hard one-eighty. The large rotor blades complained by giving out their distinctive whop-whop-whop.
Once they were turned around, headed south, Edmonds slipped the chopper to the right to see the most from his and Hollister’s side.
“There’s a narrow trail in the grass up over that next stand of trees. Looked like footprints in the mush to me,” the copilot said.
No one said anything as the chopper cleared the small trees and the beaten path of grasses crossed under them from left to right.
“It’s sure lookin’ like real people tracks to me,” Edmonds said as he pulled the nose up again, stopped the forward speed, and teased the chopper into a hover facing in the same direction as the footprints—east.
“Guns standing by?” Hollister asked over the Tactical radio frequency.
“We’re locked and cocked,” the lead gunship pilot replied from his orbit a mile and a half away and eighteen hundred feet above the C&C.
Edmonds slipped the chopper to the right, putting the trail out the left door and heading in the same direction. “Folks, let’s each take our own quadrant of the chopper and search that area of the ground. Does us no good to all be looking at the trail up ahead of us,” Edmonds announced to the other three crew members.
Hollister slipped the buckle on his seat belt to give him some more slack in order to get his head farther out the door. He watched new sections of the trail reveal themselves from just in front of the chopper’s chin bubble. The footprints were clear. They were fresh, and the grass was still flattened down under an inch or so of water.
“We’re getting real close,” Hollister said.
“How so?” Edmonds asked.
“The water is turning muddy. It hasn’t settled.”
“Damn. Good eye, Cap’n H.”
Two metallic twaps cut through the noise of the chopper turbine and the rotor blades.
“Taking fire! Bushes at ten o’clock,” the left door gunner yelled just before he thumbed the butterfly trigger on the back end of his M60.
The tracers from the machine gun slashed by Hollister’s face. He followed them to a stand of small trees at the end of the trail. Two more green tracers left the trees and went just over the chopper. Hollister had a horrifying thought: What if they hit the blades? He had no idea what kind of damage a direct hit with a rifle round would do.
Edmonds violently jerked the vehicle around to the right to put the long axis of the trees between the enemy fire and the chopper. At the same time, he dropped from under a hundred to almost ten feet off the ground.
For a split second Hollister thought the chopper’s brutal motions meant they might have taken some main rotor damage and were going down. But it quickly became obvious that Edmonds was expertly using every trick he knew to reduce the chopper’s vulnerability.
“Damage?” Edmonds asked, turning to look over his shoulder at the door gunner who shook his head—none that he could see.
The copilot did the same with the crew chief—seated on the opposite side of the chopper. He also shook his head.
“Well, something tagged us. It’s still flying. So let’s see how long the luck lasts. Keep your eyes open for damage back there,” Edmonds said.
The door gunners kept their weapons trained on the source of the enemy fire and shot burst after burst of machine-gun fire into the trees.
Hollister leaned out and looked up and around for the gunships. He saw them rolling in on the target—one a hundred meters behind the other. He heard the lead gun pilot. “We’ve got the target. We’re gonna lay a few rockets on their asses. Stay clear.”
Edmonds answered, then put more distance between the C&C and the enemy position. As they pulled up and away, Hollister could see that the trail they had been following stopped in the clump of trees where the firing had come from.
The lead Cobra punched off two pairs of rockets. The four rockets erupted from the two large cylindrical pods hung on the stubby wings just outside the AC’s position in the gunship.
As the four rockets passed the chopper’s nose, the pilot broke right and announced his path to his wingman, who quickly reached the same spot in the sky and punched off two pairs of his rockets.
Just as the second pair of rockets picked up speed and stabilized, the first pair converged on the trees.
The enemy in the trees got a few rounds off—directed at the Cobras a fraction of a second before the first volley of rockets hit their target, turning the trees into shards and splinters in small puffs of gray-black smoke.
No one said anything, waiting for the second set of rockets to impact. Before the smoke from the first cleared, the second group hit lower on the target than the first.
“Shit!” Edmonds said.
“What?” Hollister asked.
“We have to break for the Texaco station. Or we can land this thing and walk home with a gas can.”
“Guns? You got a plan?” Hollister asked.
The lead answered. “I’m going in for a look, and my wing is going to cover me. Couldn’t be too much left in those bushes.”
“Can we stay that long?’ Hollister asked Edmonds.
“If we hurry. It’s a real embarrassing thing to run out of fuel in a country that is damn near awash in aviation fuel.”
“Okay, Reptile, make it fast,” Hollister said.
The lead gunship pilot clicked twice, and rolled over and down out of his orbit. His wingman stayed high and ready to cover his partner’s approach to the target.
Edmonds had taken the C&C to fifteen hundred feet and was on the opposite side of the orbit that the gunships had cut in the sky.
Every eye was on the lead gunship as he dropped to the deck and came toward the still smoking target from the east. With the sun to his back and flying a chopper barely three feet wide, he reduced the chance that any survivor in the target area could get a good sight picture on his approaching Cobra.
He took the gunship up and over the site in one moderately fast pass—no ground fire.
After a fast and tight turn, he did it again, only slower and lower. Still, no one spoke.
On the third pass the gunship came to a hover over the target. The pilot rolled the cyclic around in a small circle, and the rotor disk did a rotation like a spinning coin settling to a stop. The motion blew the loose debris in all directions and fanned the small branches of the trees. “We got two real dead bad guys here. There’s a busted up AK, and the other guy either doesn’t have a weapon or it’s lost in the water somewhere.”
The radio erupted in overlapping cross talk as the pi
lots cheered and congratulated the Cobra pilots.
“Anything left to go in for?” Hollister asked.
“Not much more than a grease spot. One of the rockets must have gone off just over their heads. The other three were close—but not in cigar territory,” the lead Cobra pilot said.
“Okay, we’re heading back. We’ll see you there.”
“You got time to take a pass over the site and give me a confirmation on the kills?”
Hollister switched to intercom. “Okay with the fuel situation?”
The copilot’s left hand came up, making an O with his thumb and forefinger.
“Okay, we’ll take a look for you,” Hollister told the gunship leader.
Hovering over the spot from which they had taken fire only minutes before, Hollister looked down at the bodies. They were wearing simple pajamas and long-sleeved tops. One was wearing Ho Chi Minhs and the other was wearing lace-up Bata boots. The rucksack that had been scattered by the detonations contained another set of pajamas and a full set of cooking utensils—nothing more. The dead looked young. It struck Hollister that they died on their first day in the country. If you were going to go, that seemed as good a way as any.
“We have to go. This is real serious in the fuel business now,” Edmonds said.
“Okay, take us home. We’ve earned a decent breakfast today.”
“You got that shit right,” Edmonds said.
Hollister sat back and reached for another cigarette as Edmonds nosed the chopper over and pulled in power to head back to Cu Chi.
“Two KBA,” Hollister announced over the radio.
“Glad to be of service,” the gunship lead replied. “Piece of cake.”
“Thanks.”
Hollister called in the action to Operations, which had monitored most of the short contact but still had many questions—most of which were coming from IIFFV. Unable to answer all the questions, Hollister told Operations they would have to wait until the debriefing to get all the details. He instructed them to tell IIFFV that they, too, would have to wait. He knew that message would not go over well.