Low Level Hell

by Hugh Mills

  But there was one thing I never did learn while I was flying slicks. That was how to be patient when I saw the hunter-killer teams taking off to scout out and lay destruction on the enemy. I didn't want to just react to the enemy. I wanted to be out there finding the enemy and laying the point of the bayonet to him.

  During the days that I was flying Hueys, John Herchert was in and out of my hootch every once in a while. Herchert was commanding officer of the scout platoon, the Outcasts.

  One day Herchert stopped by my bunk to tell me that one of his scout pilots had been hurt and there would be an opening in the platoon. “I need a section leader,” he told me. “If you still want to fly scouts, we've got a job for you.”

  My transfer from slicks to the scout platoon was made on 23 March 1969. I had finally made it to the Outcasts!

  The instructor pilot for the OH-6, CW2. Bill Hayes, was off on R and R for a few days when I was transferred, so I started my OH-6 orientation with scout pilots Bill Jones (One Eight) and Jim Morrison (One Four). I had a lot to learn.

  The OH-6 had a personality all her own. She was light, nimble, and extremely responsive to every control input. While the Huey was stable, dependable, kind of like the faithful family sedan, the OH-6 was like getting a brand-new MGA Roadster. She was sexy!

  The ship was unusually quiet in flight, giving her the added advantage of being practically on top of a potential enemy before anyone on the ground even knew a helicopter was around.

  By design, the OH-6 was small and cramped. Her mission gross weight was just over 2,160 pounds. With the main rotor extended, she was only 30 feet, 3 3/4 inches long, and at the pilot's cabin just a fraction over 4 1/2 feet wide. Not much space for two pilot seats side by side, with an instrument console in between.

  There was room inside for just three people—the crew chief-door gunner on the right side of the rear cabin, the pilot in the right front seat, and the copilot-observer in the left front seat.

  In combat configuration, the crew chief's jump seat in the back was rigged so that the gunner sat sideways facing the open right rear cabin door. His M-60 hung in front of him from a bungee cord. Having no seat belt harness per se, the crew chief had a “monkey strap” that secured him to the aircraft but allowed him to move around the cabin.

  Vulnerable as he was to ground fire from the bottom and into both sides of the aircraft, the crew chief sat in a canvas jump seat, the underside of which was fitted with a tungston carbide armor plate. He also wore two chicken plate body armor units, one shielding his chest and the other covering his back. The chicken plate body armor for aircrewmen consisted of a curved ceramic fiberglass shell over a tungston carbide inner liner. This ballistic barrier was capable of defeating up to 7.62mm small-arms fire (such as AK-47 enemy rounds), but nothing as large as .50-caliber projectiles.

  Under Herchert's system of flying three-man scout crews, each crew member had his own area of responsibility. The pilot basically flew the airplane. The crew chief, in the backseat right behind the pilot, was the door gunner and the crewman responsible for releasing grenades out the door. The various types of grenades were lined up on a wire strung across the back of the pilot's armor plate. These usually included several colors of smoke, Willie Pete (white phosphorous), and concussion and fragmentation grenades. Besides his M-60, the crew chief might also have other ordnance stowed around and under his seat, such as an M-79 grenade launcher, a shotgun, and an M-16 rifle. The experienced crew chief also helped with the scouting work on the right side of the aircraft in support of the pilot, who had to split his scouting mission between watching forward and sideways to the right while at the same time flying the aircraft.

  The observer had the visual responsibility for the left side of the aircraft, from about twelve o'clock to his front to eight or eight-thirty behind. Strapped into the copilot's seat, it was difficult for him to see very far over his left shoulder toward the rear of the ship, but there was an excellent view to the immediate left and left forward. Scout ships flew without doors, so there was an uninterrupted field of vision.

  The observer carried a weapon that he could fire out the left side. This was in lieu of minigun units, which were not mounted on Herchert's OH-6s. Some left-seaters had a standard M-60, but that weapon was less than satisfactory because of its weight and the fact that it would jam easily when fired with its casing ejector pointed against the air-stream. So most observers used M-16s or CAR-15s. The CAR-15 was shorter and easier to handle. Both the M-16 and CAR-15 resisted jamming because they were magazine fed from the bottom of the weapon and not affected by the force of the airstream.

  The observer would also string smoke, gas, and incendiary grenades on wires all over the front of the cockpit. Wires were hooked anyplace they could be on the side of the ship, and then connected to the ship's instrument panel. That provided room for extra grenades to be attached by their spoons to various places on the aircraft. Sometimes, they were even stuck in holes in the instrument panel if instruments had been removed for repair.

  The weight of the three crew members left no room for a minigun and ammunition. Scouting policy, as established by Major Cummings and John Herchert, was that a scout was to scout—nothing else. The scout half of the Loach-Cobra team was to find the enemy and, if fired upon, drop smoke and call in the Cobra to shoot up the place. The scout usually didn't even go back into the area to recon it after the gun made its passes.

  I was aware that probably nine or ten sets of the XM27E1 minigun kits for the OH-6 were sitting in storage over at aircraft maintenance. But they had never been installed on the ships. The reasoning was that, with a minigun on the aircraft, the Loach pilot would be concentrating on shooting and not focusing on the scouting requirements at hand. It was not a scout's job, according to Herchert, to try to kill the enemy—just to find him for the Cobras.

  It always seemed to me that the enemy, under those rules, had more control of his situation than we did. All Charlie had to do when a Loach got too close was to rip off a burst or two in the scout's general direction, and the OH-6 was gone, probably for good.

  My first scout orientation flight was with Bill Jones, Darkhorse One Eight. On that first flight, I flew as the observer, in the left front seat. I was to be the third set of eyeballs on the mission, my initial VR-1 (visual reconnaissance team 1) operation. The date was 24 March 1969, and we were scheduled to depart at 0530.

  We flew in the company of our “snake” (Cobra gunship) and headed for a recon of the Michelin rubber plantation, located about forty-five kilometers northwest of our base at Phu Loi. One scout and one Cobra usually comprised the hunter-killer team, and VR-1 was always the first regularly scheduled helicopter flight to go out in the early morning for normal reconnaissance of enemy activity.

  The Michelin was known to contain large concentrations of enemy troops—a perfect place for me to start learning how to scout.

  Dawn was still fifteen minutes away when Jones and I climbed aboard the OH-6 and strapped in The crew chief was always the last one to get into the ship. It was his job to unsnap the fire extinguisher that was stowed at the pilot's right foot and stand fire guard at the rear of the ship while the pilot was cranking. He watched the engine section and, in case of a fire on start-up, he would alert the crew and allow them to exit the aircraft while applying the extinguisher.

  While One Eight was running up the engine, he asked me to get on the radio and check artillery. Our flight was to take us from Phu Loi up to the vicinity of Dau Tieng, then on over the Michelin. The point in checking artillery activity was, as Jones subtly put it, “My whole day would be ruined if we fly into our own artillery rounds on the way up there.”

  When Jones had the aircraft at full running RPMs, he called the Phu Loi tower for clearance. The crew chief had replaced the fire extinguisher in the aircraft and climbed back aboard to secure his seat belt and monkey strap harness.

  As we departed and cleared the perimeter fence outbound, the door gunner armed his M-60. H
e pulled the bolt to the rear, locking it in place, then lifted the feed tray cover, pulled on the safety, and inserted a belt of ammunition. The belt was tied directly to the fifteen hundred to three thousand rounds of linked ammo in the wooden box at his feet. He was then ready to fire with just the flick-off of the gun's safety.

  En route, Jones lined up on the usual forty-five-degree angle off his Cobra's left wing and maintained altitude at fifteen hundred feet. This altitude kept us out of the range of enemy small-arms ground fire.

  I kept a close eye on One Eight and paid careful attention to everything he was doing. There really wasn't much for the observer to do until the mission area was reached. I also noticed the team coordination between the scout pilot, the scout gunner, and the observer. It was evident that the scout pilot was the cement that held the team together.

  We were nearing Dau Tieng. Off at about two o'clock I could see the tall, straight, tightly interwoven rubber trees of the Michelin plantation. They looked lush and beautiful.

  One Eight had told me that the area below us was loaded with enemy soldiers, who felt secure there for a couple of reasons. First of all, the thick foliage made it nearly impossible to detect movement or military activity. Second, the bad guys were aware that the United States was reluctant to create an international incident and would avoid going into the plantation after them, and possibly shooting up the invaluable rubber trees!

  Jones was now on the radio talking to his gunship, asking about the rules of engagement for this mission. This was always done before a scout ship descended into the area to be worked. In some mission areas, the Cobra would instruct the scout to maintain a “weapons tight” condition, which meant that the scout was permitted to fire only in self-defense. In other areas the scout had “weapons free” authorization—he could shoot anything that appeared hostile. Weapons free was the order for that day. One Eight was quick to tell me, however, that there was a modifier to both of those weapons conditions, that being the Darkhorse rules of engagement. It was troop law that nobody shot noncombatants or women or children, unless they were shooting at you.

  Jones kicked the bird out of altitude and down to treetop level, where we would begin our scouting patterns. Until I had actually taken that helicopter fall from fifteen hundred feet to treetop level, I had no idea how dramatic and violent, how exhilarating and terrifying, that maneuver was. You were moving along comfortably in your aircraft on a horizontal axis. Then suddenly the ship was kicked over into a near-vertical descent, and your stomach felt as though it had just been pitched into the roof of your mouth.

  Then, just as suddenly, that movement was followed by a recovery back into a horizontal axis for entry into the search area. The next thing you noticed was how close you were to the trees—how they suddenly were rushing by your feet at what seemed like hundreds of miles an hour, although you were flying somewhere in the vicinity of only sixty knots. But to a fledgling scout pilot, that seemed too damned fast!

  All I could see was a sea of green—a blurred rush of foliage beneath the ship's bubble that was totally indistinguishable. The sensation actually made me airsick. The only way I could even briefly relieve my nausea was to concentrate on something in the cockpit that was not moving.

  I wondered how in the hell a scout pilot was supposed to see anything on the ground flying like this. I had flown low level before, but always concentrating on my piloting, not on what was passing beneath me.

  “Always,” Jones said after we were down, “come out of altitude in an irregular manner.” In his own quiet, almost philosophical way, Jones continued to instruct me over the intercom. “Remember back at Rucker how they taught you to come down in a standard flight school spiral… how to do those broad, regular, descending orbits that were just as predictable as going down a spiral staircase? Well, don't ever do that when you're scouting. It's not all that difficult for an enemy to determine your descent pattern and angle. He'll fix where you're going to come out over the ground, orient all his weapons in that specific area, and put his rounds right into your gut.” That made sense to me.

  “What you want to do,” he went on, “is get out of altitude quickly. Come down a good distance away from the area you intend to work, then slide in low and fast so the bad guys have less chance of picking you up. Then as soon as you're down and start your sweeps of the area, begin looking for anything that jumps out at you, anything that looks different from everything else.”

  Jones radioed that he was breaking to go low level and start his pattern. His gun replied, “Roger that, One Eight… and why don't you take a look at that clearing off your right nose for any signs of bunkers in the tree line?”

  Jones had come out of our descent at treetop level a mile or so away from the search area; now he made for the clearing pointed out by the gun.

  After a few seconds running along the tree line, One Eight barked at me over the intercom. “Did you see that?”

  “See what?” I yelled back as I scoured the ground.

  “I'll come around again, and when I say ‘now,' you look hard three o'clock right over my helmet visor and tell me what you see.” I still didn't see anything but a clearing in the jungle; absolutely nothing seemed out of place.

  Finally, in desperation, Jones said, “Look where I'm pointing. See the square shape there on the ground just beyond the tree line? That's a ten-by-ten enemy bunker. The entrances are the dark holes on either side.” He continued in his schoolteacher manner. “The reason the bunker pops out to the scout is that square shape amidst a shapeless bunch of trees. It's out of place. It doesn't belong there.”

  Circling the area, Jones went on with his observations. “You can see also that the bunker hasn't been used recently—no beat-down trails in the grass around it, and the color of the camouflage foliage on top of the bunker is browner, deader looking, than the surroundings.” Jones turned to me. “If you're going to be a scout, you've just got to be alert to anything—”

  At that moment, One Eight abruptly broke off his comment. I looked ahead to see the top of a dead tree looming in front of the ship. Jones jerked the cyclic stick back into his gut and hauled up the collective nearly out of the floor. The agile little OH-6 literally jumped over the top of the tree. We heard branches brush against the Plexiglas bubble and underside of the fuselage as we blew by.

  “Holy Shit!” I gasped.

  Jones calmly went on talking. “You've just got to be alert to anything that jumps out at you, including the tops of old, dead trees.”

  It became obvious that learning to scout from a helicopter would be a continuing process of on-the-job training. There were no army manuals to consult, no special training classes to attend. There was, in fact, no in-place source for helicopter scouting information at all in the army, except the experienced aeroscout pilots who flew every day. Only they could tell and show you what signs to look for, and how to read, report, and react to those signs once you found them in the field.

  The aeroscout's job, I learned, fell generally into four basic types of work (though all four might occur in a single scouting mission):

  1. Conducting Visual Recons (VRs). Scouting for enemy base camps, fighting positions, supply caches, trails, and any and all signs of enemy movement and activity.

  2. Making Bomb Damage Assessments (BDAs). Scouting areas hit by our B-52 strikes to evaluate bomb damage to the terrain, enemy structures, and personnel. This was generally done immediately following the strike.

  3. Evaluating Landing Zones (LZ Recon). Scouting out potential landing areas for the lift platoon's Hueys. Making a careful aerial check of physical characteristics of the LZ, asking yourself the question, if I were flying with the slicks, would I like to land in that area?

  4. Screening for Ground Units (for example, the ARPs). Flying on all sides of the friendly unit on the ground as aerial eyes to help them reach their objective, to give them information to guide their direction of movement, to help them choose the most advantageous terrain, and to keep the
unit informed as to the area and situation to its front and flanks.

  From 24 to 29 March, I continued to fly as copilot-observer with scout pilots Bill Jones and Jim Morrison. With my new scout call sign, Darkhorse One Seven, I logged 14.4 hours of combat flying, mostly in the Trapezoid area, which included the “Iron T,” and the Michelin rubber plantation.

  Both Jones and Morrison were excellent scouts and good teachers. They had been in Vietnam about the same length of time and had flown together, learning their scouting techniques from each other. Their basic methods were pretty much alike, but Morrison emphasized airspeed. “Don't get under sixty knots. If you do, you're going to get hit,” he would say.

  After much flying experience, I came to agree that Morrison was statistically correct. The more often a scout flew less than sixty knots, the more often he would take hits-^-no question about it. The Vietnamese ground gunners had a habit of firing right at you without applying any lead. By moving across the ground at sixty to seventy knots, their rounds would often hit three to four feet behind the ship.

  With Bill Jones, scouting meant paying attention to every detail while still seeing the whole. Concentrating on shapes, colors, and hues, Jones made scouting an art. He understood, and introduced me to, the five basic principles of scouting from a helicopter: strict attention to contrast, color, glint, angles, and movement.

  In time, I was able to lend my own degree of perception to these basics. I would discover, and rediscover many times over, just how fundamental these concepts were in finding, fixing, and destroying the enemy—especially an adversary who was so cunning in disguising his activities, and who was at home in his own environment.