Then a radio call from Division Ops, a grunt patrol could hear Vietnamese voices and movement, but they couldn’t see where they came from. Flares. Flares would let them fix the enemy for destruction by the artillery or machine guns. No artillery or C-130s available tonight. Here are the coordinates, takeoff now!
You run to the aircraft down the dark path, yelling as you go and by the time you climb in the back over the slick ramp, the APU is running and the red lights are glowing and oh, shit is it dark out there beyond the wire …
By the time you are strapped in and have your helmet on, the copilot has the engines running and the blades turning and you take the controls, and as the flight engineer says “Ready in the back, clear to lift” you are pulling up on the thrust lever and climbing into the dark, dark, dark. As you clear the wire around Camp evans, all you see are the red instruments on your dash as you climb toward the invisible mountains to the west and north.
The Air Force radar is up tonight and over the UHF radio, you give them the grid coordinates where you are headed, where the grunts need the flares NOW. they vector you in that direction as you continue to climb until you hit 10,000 feet, the standard operating procedure (SOP), drop altitude, 4,000 feet above the highest mountain in I Corps. Leveling off at 10,000 there is still no horizon except along the coast where there are city and town lights—clouds above you and darkness everywhere—cold up there too and you close your window against the wind blowing in. Then you are in further darkness as your aircraft enters the clouds and only the red glow of your flight instruments keeps you oriented to know up from down, right from left. The copilot turns off the upper red anti-collision lights so the red glare does not distract you. the words and directions of the Air Force controller keep you moving toward the coordinates of the grunts that need your flares.
At this stage of your flying career, you don’t have much instrument flight time since Army flight school concentrated on getting the pilots to the war as quickly as possible, so you concentrate hard on the instruments, scanning back and forth across the red gauges, attitude, altitude, airspeed, heading, attitude, altitude, airspeed, attitude, altitude, airspeed. Attitude means your wings are level, you are climbing, not diving in the blackness below. There is no autopilot in this Chinook so you must concentrate attitude, altitude, airspeed because a few seconds loss of concentration and you could be out of control and that cannot happen because the men in the back trust you to bring them back from this mission; you are the aircraft commander, the AC.
Your copilot calls the grunts on the fox mike, asking for the situation on the ground and they whisper back. The NVA are near and they cannot talk much or very loudly without giving themselves away. In response to their whisper, your copilot whispers back, but they cannot hear him so he switches back to normal volume. His voice is cool, always cool, knowing that you are listening to him, the crew is listening to him, the grunts are listening and he cannot be anything but cool least it upset the crew, the grunts, and diminishes him in their eyes. In his eyes too …
For once the flight engineer, the Chief, is listening to the radios too and when he knows the aircraft is close to tonight’s destination, he gets the crew up and ready to start dropping the flares. Behind you, on the cabin side of the companionway, he pulls the black curtain they have hung over the opening closed so that they can use the bright white cabin lights without blinding the pilots. You cannot see what they are doing, but you know that they have removed the plastic covers from the tops of the first group of flares. The flares will not be, must not be, cannot be, armed until they are in the tube, ready for drop. One man will lift the flare and another will guide it into the tube and together they will hold it there while the timing settings are adjusted on the top. During the process, should anything go wrong, they just let go of it and the flare falls harmlessly away from the aircraft. God help us all if one ever goes off inside the cabin. The burning magnesium will eat a hole right through the cabin deck and set everything close to it on fire as it goes through the flooring.
You have the grunts’ position in grid coordinates as close as they can give it to you, and the Air Force radar controller begins to vector you in a race track pattern over it. The controller has the winds aloft forecast and moves you a little north so that the flares will move south on their parachutes over the grunts’ position for as long as possible instead of drifting uselessly away. You tell the Chief to drop two so that the grunts can see if you are in position to give them the light they need. As he calls “two away,” you brace for the flash of light that comes when they go off in the clouds. The flash never comes. The flares did not light.
“Check your settings and drop three more,” you tell the Chief, and moments later he calls them gone. Still no flash, but the grunts below report loud crashes and thuds around them. the flares are falling straight to the ground without their parachutes opening.
The grunts are calling for flares more urgently now. The impact of the unlit flares has the NVA excited. Something is going on but they don’t know what. You tell the Chief to just start throwing flares out, hoping you will run out of the bad batch of flares and into a batch that is not defective.
He has ten more out the chute before you tell him to hold. You know you are into a good lot by the dim flashes below you in the clouds. The grunts report it looks like full daylight around them. the NVA have gone, their voices faded as the flares turn the darkness into temporary light. No more flares are required for this mission. Just as the NVA have gone, now so have the clouds and when you look up from attitude, altitude, and airspeed, you see you are in open skies, stars and a faint, faint moon above.
You call back to battalion to tell them you are on your way home, but they tell you to hold, another mission is coming and if you still have flares they want you to take it. There are still 25 or more flares back there so you maintain your altitude at 10,000 feet, comfortable now in the clear air, and you ask the Air Force to keep you in your present position until you are directed to where you are needed next. Passing control of the aircraft to the copilot, you light a cigarette and look out the window toward the faint, dark ground below. Up to the north you can see the lights of the coastal villages in North Vietnam. It seems odd—they should be dark against our bombers, like in WWII, you think as you look at what must be the lights of a small town in the far distance. But then we don’t bomb coastal villages and towns, just jungle and military positions. Do we?
On the ground there is a flash, then another and another. Artillery impacting. How odd that it should be hitting there in the lowlands so close to what your map shows as friendly positions. You switch the fox mike to the arty clearance agency and ask who’s firing and where it’s going. No one is shooting, they tell you, so you give them the location of the impacting rounds as close as you can figure it. Still they insist no one is shooting, yet you see more flashes below you. Arty clearance again tells you it isn’t us shooting.
Looking to the north across the DMZ, you see a faint flash and you count until you see the flash on the ground below you. North Vietnamese artillery is shooting into the south. You’ve waited a long time for this. Digging through the papers in your helmet bag, you find the one you need and then pull the signal operating instructions (SOI) from the pocket in your bullet bouncer and find the frequency for the long range 175’s howitzers at their firebase near Dong Ha.
“Oscar Kilo One, Playtex One two, fire mission over.”
A moment of silence from the artillery, they’ve never had a Chinook call in a fire mission before. They ask you to authenticate who you are by using the code letters in the SOI, and when they are satisfied that you are who you say you are, they give you the artilleryman’s reply, “Playtex One two, Oscar Kilo One, fire mission out.”
Your heart starts beating faster as you prepare to adjust the long-range guns against the enemy positions. With each radio, you call in the sequence you must go through to adjust artillery fire and hope no one stops you. When you talk to artill
ery, headquarters at each level is always listening and can abort the mission with a word. But also when you talk to artillery, silence is consent, and silence remains except for you and the gunners calling back and forth.
“Counter-battery fire,” you tell them, and you can almost hear the passion in the artilleryman’s voice as he answers you. Cannon against cannon, maybe for the first time in this war. Their 175’s will rip the old Soviet guns the NVA are firing into twisted hot metal bits as soon as the rounds arrive on target.
As you near the end of the call for fire checklist, maybe 30 seconds from the first rounds headed down range, things change. Out of the black sky, over the enemy gun position in North Vietnam, comes a bright red stream of tracers, like a fire hose spraying red water. An AC-130 Specter gunship has found the enemy and is playing their 20mm Gatling guns over them, maybe their onboard 105mm gun too. On the ground below the invisible Air Force aircraft, you can see little flashes in the blackness. The big flashes to the north have stopped. You tell the artillery what happened and they “roger.” You go off their frequency and return to standing by, waiting in orbit at 10,000 feet. To the north, where the flashes came from, there is only blackness now. The lights of the small city still twinkle.
You are down to only an hour of fuel remaining when battalion tells you the other mission is canceled and you can come on back to Phu Bai. You are getting tired now and welcome the call. As you fly south, the clouds return and you are inside them again. You take the controls back from the copilot, attitude, altitude, airspeed. Only blackness outside the red glow of your cockpit now and you want badly for this to be over. You are so tired, tired from concentrating on keeping your aircraft in the air, tired from trying to get light to the grunts, tired …
The Air Force radar turns you over to Phu Bai radar for a ground controlled approach (GCA) “Playtex, descend to 1000 on heading 180,” they call as they line you up for the runway. The calls come, left, right, on course, above glide path, below glide path, left, right, on glide path, on course, approaching decision height and then you are out of the clouds and the runway is in front of you where it should be. “Switch to tower frequency,” the GCA controller calls, wishing you good night. Then, as your copilot finishes switching, bright white flashes stream in front of you between you and the runway. 5o cal machine gun and blood pumping, you pull in an armload of thrust and shoot back into the now sheltering clouds, climbing as hard as the aircraft can climb.
“Tower, Playtex One Two, you’ve got a 50 cal right off the end of your runway,” you scream into the radio.
Silence for a moment, then, “Playtex One Two, tower, those are the approach lights.”
A few more moments of silence and then again from the tower, “One Two, would you like another approach?”
Your copilot switches the radio back to GCA and you shoot the second approach until you can see the ground, ignoring the flashing strobes this time, and when you see the ground, you break off approach and fly visually the ten minutes back to Liftmaster Pad a couple miles away and end tonight’s mission.
After you taxi the Chinook back into the revetment, you start the shutdown checklist. When the rotor blades finally stop and the APU comes off line, you realize you are too tired to get out of the cockpit and you sit there in the seat in the early morning light for a few minutes until you feel you can climb out on your own. You hope no one notices, but you see the flight engineer watching you. He knows the tiredness you feel, and he knows not to say anything about it. You did the mission and brought them all back and that’s all that matters right now. It is nearly dawn as you walk away from the aircraft toward Ops to turn in your KY-28 and blood chits. Your fellow pilots are preflighting their Chinooks in the dark. Soon the Playtex aircraft will be lifting off into the morning sun for their day’s missions.
11
NAPALM
NORTHERN I CORPS, VIETNAM ■ JULY 1971
Youth is a wonderful thing. Before you actually recognize that you are not immortal, you do things that in retrospect were so incredibly stupid you wonder, what were you thinking? Then you realize you weren’t thinking at all. Orders were orders and you just did the missions. The missions must be done.
One of my fellow Playtex ACs rode along on a napalm drop with his 8mm movie camera with a zoom lens. In the back of the Chinook, he lay on the deck next to the flight engineer, looking down through the hellhole at the load of red drums swinging in the net below the aircraft and the green forest below them. As the Chinook began its drop run, he aimed the camera at the load, focusing on one barrel marked with a slash of white paint. When the cargo hook opened, and the front of the sling released and the drums fell away, he kept his camera focused on that one barrel as it separated from the others in their fall. Beside him, the flight engineer threw a smoke grenade after the red barrels, purple smoke against the green jungle, but the smoke was only in frame for a second as he continued to follow the barrel going down. As the chosen red barrel fell, the AC worked the zoom to keep it large in frame—red barrel filling the view with blurry green forest around the edges. Then the red barrel disappeared into the green. Two, maybe three seconds later, the green disappeared into red orange flame and as he zoomed out, the view became green around the red orange, then black gray coming up from the red orange. Then he released the camera trigger and the view went all black.
Mostly we dropped napalm to clear out mines and booby traps the NVA planted around firebases, trails, and landing zones. Napalm was, at best, a temporary solution; the vegetation grew back so fast that it was hard to tell what had been burned after two weeks had passed. The mines and booby traps grew back fast too. Mostly we dropped napalm to clear mines and booby traps, but not always.
The Chemical Corps made the napalm we dropped and commanded the drop missions. The formula they used was probably not the one used by the big company famous for its napalm, but it worked. One of the RLOs (“real live officers,” lieutenants, captains, etc., as opposed to warrant officers) told me that they just put powdered laundry detergent in with the mogas (motor gasoline) in the red 55-gallon drums so that the mogas would jell. Jellies stick to things better than liquids and burn longer.
Fifteen of the red drums would be filled and placed in a cargo net. Our usual pickup zone (PZ) for the napalm missions was the Chemical Corps pad at Camp Evans, 30 miles north of Phu Bai. When we came into the pad at Camp Evans to hookup the load, the rigger would attach the sling to our aircraft with two donuts so that when we released, by pushing the pickle switch (the sling load release button, the normal way we let go of external loads), only the front of the sling would let go. The fifteen drums would spill out while the net remained attached for the crew to drag inside the aircraft. Save the net for reuse since cargo nets are expensive. Red 55-gallon drums full of jellied gasoline are cheap.
After the load fell away, the pilot would hold the aircraft steady at 70 knots or so while the crew pulled the net in, all the while thinking about how the slow Chinook was giving the NVA time to set up their firing solution to take the aircraft out of the sky.
The mission was simple. We would fly into the PZ, line up with the load designated by the hook-up man’s up-raised arm, and lower the aircraft to about 25 feet above the ground while bringing the load under our nose. As we came over the load, the hook-up man would raise the donuts, the nylon ring on the end of the sling, and try to hit the hook as soon as possible, always risking shock from the build up of static electricity or getting hit by the aircraft or by the hook.
“Load’s in sight. Load’s coming under the nose,” I called as I eased the Chinook forward slowly.
The flight engineer would reply, “Load’s in sight. Forward ten, five, three. Hold your forward. Down ten, five, three. Load’s being hooked. Load’s hooked. Up slow. Tensions coming on the sling. Steady. Back five. Steady. Up. Up. Load’s off five, ten, twenty—clear to go.”
I would climb out slowly, holding the transition to forward flight as smoothly as possible so as n
ot to set the load swinging. The drums had a large surface area for their weight and could be unstable. As we passed 200 feet, I would tell the copilot to “safe” the hook. He would move the switch on the overhead console back from the “arm” position to the “safe” position so that we would not accidentally release the load before it was time. Top speed with napalm was 90 knots, by company standard operating procedures (SOP), the same as any external load. I would hold 90 until beginning the drop run and then slow to 70 for the actual drop. I climbed to 3,000 feet, our usual cruise altitude, above accurate small arms fire range and at the limit of accurate fire from the heavier .51 anti-aircraft machine guns, but they were rare. None had been reported recently where we were going today. So, at 90 knots and 3,000 feet, I would fly the big helicopter to the area for the drop with fifteen 55-gallon drums of napalm swinging below me, and on final approach would descend to our drop altitude of 1,500 feet.
Just like the pickup of the load at Camp Evans, the actual drop was not usually difficult. Sometimes a LOACH would mark the targets for us with a smoke grenade, but usually it would just be the Chemical Corps officer pointing at a place on a map and then at a place on the ground. With the target in sight, we would turn toward it from down-wind so that the red drums would fall closer to where we wanted them. Flying into the wind at 70 knots, I would watch for the load to pass under the nose and appear again between the rudders. At my command, the copilot would arm the hook by pushing the overhead switch forward. When the load reached the hydraulic line between the rudders that we used for reference, I would push the pickle switch with my right little finger and call “pickle” over the ICS. In the back the hook opened, the front of the net released, and the red drums began their fall. They tumbled toward the green earth, red drums spinning and tumbling end over end, red, red, green earth, red.
Surprised at Being Alive: An Accidental Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam and Beyond Page 11