by Hugh Mills
Finishing up our preflight outside, I climbed aboard and strapped in. Crockett grabbed the fire extinguisher from its rack on the right side of my seat and posted himself as fire guard. I fingered the starter switch with my right index finger and started cranking the turbine.
In a little more than a minute, the ship was running and ready to back out of the revetment. Crockett secured the fire extinguisher, made a quick walk around to the left side of the ship to remove the bullet trap assembly from the minigun barrels, then slid into his seat behind me.
With Crockett strapped in, I pulled the collective up enough to get the ship light on her skids. Then I did my health indicator and trend test (HIT) check to make sure that engine power was responding as it should, and I was ready to go. I keyed my intercom mike. “OK, Crockett, are we clear to the rear?”
Crockett leaned forward from his seat so that he could see out the door. “OK, sir, you're clear…up and rear.” He quickly followed with, “Your tail is clear right,” letting me know that I could swing into a climbing left turn out of the revetment area without running 249's tail into anything.
I keyed my mike again: “Phu Loi tower, this is Darkhorse One Seven. I've got a hunter-killer team on the cav pad … north departure Phu Cuong along the Saigon … Lai Khe.”
“Roger, Darkhorse One Seven flight of two, you're cleared to taxi to and hold short of runway three three. Winds are three five zero at eight knots, gusting to twelve knots. Altimeter setting three zero zero six. You'll be number two for takeoff following the Beaver on takeoff run now.”
I responded to the tower by reading back the altimeter setting, while I actually cranked in the setting on my instrument. This was always necessary in order to calibrate my altimeter to current barometric pressure.
Pulling up short of runway three three, I waited for the Cobra. It took them longer to get cranked since their engine and systems were more complicated than those of the OH-6. Once the aircraft was beside me, I looked over at Carriss and gave him a thumbs-up and keyed my mike on troop VHF: “Three Eight, this is One Seven. Are you ready?”
Carriss triggered his transmit switch twice, indicating that he was set to go.
We both picked up and moved out to three three where Carriss led the takeoff. The Cobra was always in the lead on takeoff, with the scout pulling over to his side very carefully.
One of the critical things in this two-ship takeoff was to watch the Cobra's rotor downwash. The Cobra was a much bigger aircraft than the OH-6, and both aircraft were at maximum gross weight because of the full fuel and ammo load. If the OH-6 pulled in just below and in trail with the Cobra, he would be right in the gun's rotor wash. The scout could easily lose his lift and bounce off the runway a couple of times before he got out of the Cobra's disturbed air.
As both aircraft cleared the perimeter fence, I could see the Cobra's minigun turret flexing as Carriss's front-seater began checking out his gun system. In our ship, Crockett did the same. Passing the perimeter fence was his signal to pull his M-60 back into his lap, draw the bolt back, load, and take the gun from safe to fire.
It was my signal, too. I stuck my left knee under the collective stick to maintain rate of climb and reached over to the console circuit breaker to power-up the armament subsystem. Then I went to the instrument panel with my freed-up left hand to flip on the master arms switch and turn the selector switch to “fire norm.”
At that point, all the weapons in the team were hot and ready for any situation we might encounter. Any area outside the base could hold an enemy capable of firing on our aircraft. So when we crossed the fence, we had to be ready.
At fifteen hundred feet, out of the range of small-arms fire, I pulled the ship up on the Cobra's wing and into an echelon left for the flight over to Phu Cuong. The Cobra maintained about ninety to one hundred knots so the scout could keep up.
Crockett and I practiced a few signals over the intercom so we'd know exactly how the other would react when we got down low. Then we relaxed and smoked a cigarette. As we cruised along toward Phu Cuong, we engaged in a little small talk about the weather and the terrain below, and just kidded around to relax a bit before reaching the search area and possible contact with the enemy.
Snapping me back to reality, Carriss came up on VHF: “One Seven, you see the intersection of the Thi Tinh and the Saigon right off your nose?”
“Yes, I've got it.”
“Due east of the intersection about three hundred yards, there's a big green open space. Let's put you down in that area and work from there.”
“Roger that.” I could feel my exhilaration building. Finally, here I was in control of my own scout ship. I wasn't on an orientation or transition flight with someone sitting in the cockpit checking me out. There was just me and the crew chief. Crockett was completely dependent on me to fly that aircraft.
I began a visual search of the grassy area below. One of the many things I had learned from Jones and Morrison was that you just don't go down from altitude into a search area. You look it over first, while you are still high enough to change your mind if the enemy is waiting for you. I was looking for people, some sign of foot trails, or for anything else that seemed out of the ordinary.
Sensing that the letdown area looked OK, Carriss came up on my VHF: “OK, One Seven, we're going to do a VR up the Saigon River. We've got a free-fire five hundred meters on both sides of the Big Blue. No river traffic is authorized until after 8 A.M., SO anything you see this early is enemy. You'll be clear to fire once you're down. When you're down, come around on a heading of three three zero degrees until you hit the river and I'll give you another heading from there.”
I hit the right pedal, moved the cyclic stick right forward, and dropped the collective. This was a maneuver that Jones had taught me: The aircraft went out of trim on the right side and quickly skidded into a right-hand descending turn. I lost altitude fast this way and was on the deck in seconds. Carriss put the Cobra into a left-hand orbit so he could keep me in sight.
As the ground approached, I leveled the ship by moving the cyclic to left forward and pulling in power with the collective. This rolled me out straight ahead with a cardinal direction, which I needed to change immediately. Steering a straight-line course directly into the search area could be fatal if enemy ground troops happened to be around.
So the minute I rolled out, I turned. Turned again. Then again, finally going into a couple of orbits around the grassy area to make sure I was OK. I didn't see anything, and nobody was shooting at me.
I keyed my mike to Carriss: “OK, Three Eight, we're OK. How about a heading?”
“Roger, One Seven. Turn right heading three three zero degrees to the Little Blue.”
Carriss was still up at fifteen hundred feet and had me in sight all the time. At his altitude, he had the macro view. Being right down on the deck, mine was the micro.
Seeing me pick up three three zero, Carriss came back: “OK, there you go. The river that goes off to the north-northeast is the Thi Tinh. The Big Blue is the Saigon off to the northwest. Follow the Saigon.”
Acknowledging, I came up on the left bank of the Saigon and began working. For the best coverage of the terrain, I settled in on the left bank and then took up a long orbiting maneuver that circled me back and forth across the river. With the pilot's seat on the right side of the aircraft, homing in on the west bank allowed me to see right down on that bank and straight across to the east bank.
I began my search pattern by flying northbound up the river about a hundred yards, crossing the water to my right, coming back down the right bank about the same hundred yards, then completing the circle by returning left across the river in a series of wide, overlapping orbits. The forward working orbits gave me a clear view of everything fifty yards or so in from each riverbank, plus the ability to look down into the water.
On one of these orbits, I picked up a five-foot by five-foot inactive bunker on the west bank, and a series of fish traps in one of the severa
l little tributaries emptying into the Saigon.
I kept up a steady stream of UHF reporting on what I was seeing, and Carriss's front-seater, I knew, was marking them on his map. At the end of the mission, he would use that marked-up map in his debriefing with division G-2 and G-3.
After about fifteen minutes down low in the search pattern, I was making my orbit back toward the left bank when something like a black pencil line in the sky caught my attention. About three or four klicks (kilometers) away on my right horizon, pale gray smoke was rising.
I keyed my mike and told Carriss excitedly: “Hey, Three Eight, I've got smoke! A cooking fire out there at about three four zero degrees, maybe three klicks off to my right. Do you see? Is it on the river?”
“Naw, I can't see it. Why don't you head that way direct and let's see what we've got.” I gave Crockett a “Hang on,” pulled a fast right turn, and took off straight for the smoke.
As I left the river, heading across a large open rice paddy, Carriss came up on the radio. “You're going right for a bend in the river. It's probably a cooking fire. Make a first pass but keep it fast; don't take any chances. Don't slow it down.”
Intelligence reports we had received made me think that anybody in this neck of the woods with a cooking fire going at this hour of the morning had to be an enemy. But they could be civilians. How could I know before I came up on top of them at sixty to seventy knots?
In those split seconds of breaking away from the river, I suddenly thought of something Uncle Billy had taught me back in the Arkansas mountains. A squirrel up a tree trunk will always stay on the opposite side of whatever he thinks is an adversary. He will back around the tree away from a noise, keeping the tree trunk between him and any possible danger. Uncle Billy had told me to throw a rock around to the other side of the tree; when the squirrel backed around the tree, you would have a clear shot. Coming in behind that cooking fire began to seem like a good idea.
I veered off sharply to my right about a klick away from the smoke, making a broad arc. By dropping down very low, and weaving my way below treetop level where I could, I figured I might be able to circle right in over the cooking fire on a heading of about two two zero. If they did hear us, at least we might confuse them by coming in on their backs from the north, instead of doing the expected and popping in on their front from the south.
Hitting about fifty knots, I suddenly broke in over a small tributary. Smoke from the cooking fire curled up right in front of my bubble. Reacting faster than I knew I could at this point, I dropped the collective, kicked right pedal, and yanked in enough right rear cyclic to abruptly skid into a right-hand decelerating turn. I looked straight down from fifteen to twenty feet of altitude, right into the faces of six people squatting around the cooking fire.
I could see weapons lying around, mostly AK-47s. There was one SKS semiautomatic rifle lying on a log across a backpack. The people were wearing shorts, some blue, some green, and the rest black. Nobody was wearing a shirt. One man had on a vest that carried AK-47 magazines. They all had on Ho Chi Minh sandals but none wore headgear. They obviously hadn't heard me coming. I don't know if I keyed my mike or not. All I remember is thinking, Holy SHIT! What do I do now?
As the soldiers dove in all directions for cover, Crockett ended my indecision. Without a word from me, he cut loose from the back of the cabin with his M-60. By now I had the OH-6 in a right-hand turning maneuver over the area, with my turns becoming tighter and tighter. Crockett blazed away with the M-60.
As one man lurched up and ran toward the underbrush, Crockett fired at him; his rounds cut across the dirt in front of him, then down his back.
Tah-tah-tah-tah-tah-tah … tah-tah-tah-tah-tah. Crockett stitched two more men as they broke and tried to run. I was still in tight right-hand turns, finding myself almost mesmerized as I stared with tunnel vision at what was happening right under the ship.
Suddenly I became conscious of Phil Carriss's voice firmly commanding: “Get out of there, One Seven, and let me shoot. Get the hell out of there, Mills!”
Breaking my concentration, I pulled on power and headed up and out of the killing zone. Seeing me roll out to the southeast, Carriss said, more calmly now, “I'm in hot!”
As I headed out, the Cobra rolled in right behind me. Carriss bored in with his front-seater's pipper right on the spot we had just vacated. I could hear the s-w-o-o-s-h-h … s-w-o-o-s-h-h … s-w-o-o-s-h-h as pairs of 2.75 rockets left his tubes.
He pulled out of his run for recovery with the minigun smoking. W-h-e-r-r-r'… w-h-e-r-r-r it spat as the Cobra front-seater flexed his M-28 turret on the target, following the rockets with a devastating blast of 7.62 minigun fire. Smoke and debris boiled up out of the target area. As I watched from my orbiting position out to the southeast, I couldn't help thinking about the words on the sign hanging on the wall of the troop operations room:
AND LO, I BEHELD
A PALE RIDER ASTRIDE
A DARK HORSE, AND THE
RIDER'S NAME WAS
DEATH
Carriss came back up on VHF. “One Seven, I'm going to roll back in for another pass. Are you OK?”
“I'm OK, Three Eight, and holding down here on the southeast.” With that, Carriss pulled a one eighty, rolled back into the target from south to north, and placed more “good rocks” right into the cooking fire area. The devastation was a terrifying and sobering sight.
Once back up to altitude, Carriss asked me if I wanted to make a recon of the target area. I pulled on power and started back inbound, this time headed from southwest to northeast. The cooking fire, though I hadn't noticed before, was on the south bank of this little tributary off the Saigon.
The gun's rockets had blown away most of the vegetation and overhanging growth. There were craters where the rockets had impacted, and the entire area looked as though it had been sprayed with fine dust, dirt, and mud. In spite of all that ordnance coming into this little spot in the jungle, the enemy's backpack was still in its original place on the log, with the SKS rifle lying across it.
I had made a couple of orbits, looking over the scene, when Crockett, obviously very excited, came up on the intercom. “I got three dead VC … three dead VC … I got ‘em in sight, sir. You see ‘em … do you see ‘em?”
My vision tunneled right into that area below the ship, where the three bodies were sprawled. On my third orbit, it finally occurred to me to look over toward the water. “Holy shit!” I practically screamed. Coming up right on my nose were two sampans, side by side, lying parallel to the bank. My scouting inexperience was showing. I was still focusing on individual things—the pack, the bodies, the devastation. I had failed to sweep the whole target area to see what else might be around.
One of the sampans had military equipment piled in it. The other one had a VC lying in the bottom of it face up, with an AK-47 pointed right up at me. I jerked my head around over my right shoulder and yelled at Crockett: “See the guy … you see the guy?” I didn't think to tell Crockett it was the guy in the sampan.
Crockett came back. “No, I don't see him. Where is he?”
My minigun! I thought. I'll use the minigun, since Crockett can't see him. But, again, my inexperience reared its ugly head. I was coming up too fast and close for a minigun shot. In that instant, however, I somehow managed to dump the nose and pull on power. I was suddenly almost standing on end, looking straight down at the ground through the bubble, the ship's tail sticking up in the air almost perpendicular to the ground.
I jerked the minigun trigger and in my excitement pulled right through the first trigger stop into a full four-thousand-round blast. I had the cyclic pushed full forward, tail in the air and losing more airspeed every second.
Fighting to regain control of the helicopter, I jerked back the cyclic, armpitted the collective, and nearly crashed into the top of a nipa palm. I could hear Crockett screaming into the intercom: “Son of a bitch … SON OF A BITCH, sir! You cut that son of a bitch right in half!”
Coming around again, we could see the results of the minigun, at four thousand rounds full fire: The sampan and VC were literally cut in half and sinking into the foul river water.
Crockett was back with his M-60, reconning with occasional bursts of fire. As he put some rounds into the second sampan, he asked, “Do you want me to shoot the pack?”
“No. We'll put the ARPs down to sweep the area … don't shoot the pack. How many people is that?”
“There's one in the water, three on the bank … that's four … and a couple more I can't see. Don't know about them, sir.”
Trying to control my excitement, I keyed my mike for the gun. “Hey, Three Eight, we've got a lot of stuff down here. We've got four bad guys dead, two sampans … we've got a pack … a bunch of weapons. We need to get the ARPs up here.”
“OK, One Seven, why don't you head out to the southeast, build up some airspeed, and come up to altitude. Let's hold you at altitude until we can get the ARPs on the way up here, then we'll scout an LZ for them.”
I rogered that, then monitored Carriss's FM call to Darkhorse Three (operations officer) back at the troop. “OK, Darkhorse, we've got a hot target with some body count. Let's get the ARPs out here and put them on the ground … grid X-Ray Tango 677263. You might want to start Scramble 1. Tell him that we've got about twenty-five minutes on station … and start another team up here.”
The Hueys—shut down on the “hot line”—were about to get the word to crank. Harris's ARPs, with their equipment laid out, were always on scramble alert. Everybody would run full bore for the Hueys, and the flight would be off the ground in three minutes or less.