by Hugh Mills
Harrell—typically not wearing his helmet—was crawling on the tank bust, M-16 in his right hand and dragging his shrapnel-riddled left arm beside him. Every few seconds, he'd pull himself up on his knees, brace his rifle on his bloody left arm, and fire off a burst down the trail to his southeast. He had plenty of targets down that way—and they could easily overrun his position and split the ARP blocking force.
It was a frustrating situation. The Cobras had worked up some artillery, and Sidewinder Two Two had been called to the scene to order up some of his fast movers. But we couldn't use any of that muscle until Harrell could get organized and tell us where our friendlies were located on the ground. Time was running out. It didn't look to me as though Four Six could hold much longer against what was surely a very large force hammering against his flank.
There was only one thing I could think of that might help relieve some of the pressure. It was not exactly a happy thought, but it was the only one I had at the moment.
I keyed the intercom to Parker. “OK, Jimbo,” I said, “we've been here before. The only thing I know to do is get back in there low and slow, make ourselves enough of a pain in Charlie's ass that he pays more attention to us and leaves Four Six alone long enough to get his people reorganized.”
I got back two quick squelches from Parker's intercom. He understood and was ready.
As I hovered back toward the trail, I hit the intercom again. “If you can definitely identify the enemy and can make a positive shot, fire at will, but don't hang it out too far. I'm hanging it out far enough for both of us. Here we go!”
I hovered in toward the contact point at a very low airspeed, fish-tailing the boom and rocking the aircraft back and forth as I went. As I figured, the heavy fire was suddenly diverted to us. We began to take hits; we could hear and feel the rounds crashing through the Loach's skin and passing through the open interior of the ship.
I yelled to Harrell on the FM freq. “I'm trying to draw the fire away from you. Get your people into one area. Get yourself reorganized into a position so we know where you are and can shoot.”
I could see Four Six trying to drag himself along the trail. His RTO, who had also been hit, was crawling slowly behind his platoon leader, painfully trying to keep up.
Still taking intensive enemy fire, I hovered right in over Harrell and looked him square in the face. He was badly hurt. I could see the anguish in his eyes. His left arm and hand looked like punctured raw meat, covered with blood and red dust from the trail.
He let his RTO catch up with him, then grabbed the radio handset. “We're in deep shit, One Six. I think I've got only about twenty men left to hold them off. They're trying to overrun us. Every time we move, they come at us again.”
I empathized with him, but there still wasn't a damned thing more I could do. If the enemy had chosen that very moment to overrun our people down there, we couldn't have fired a single shot for fear of shooting into the midst of our own soldiers.
The stalemate continued for almost another thirty minutes. I would draw away from the trail for a minute or so, then run back in to decoy Charlie's fire. The ship was taking terrific punishment, but neither Parker nor I had been hit. Somehow, that sturdy little OH-6 just kept on flying.
The time was enough, however, for Harrell to get his people consolidated and organized on the trail. His earlier guess was accurate—he had only about twenty ARPs left to try to keep the enemy at bay.
Suddenly Four Six's voice boomed into my phones. “Fire's picking up, One Six. I think they're pushing … I think they're coming!”
I looked down. Harrell was standing up in the middle of the trail, pointing his weapon to his southeast and letting go with a full magazine of ammo. All his other ARPs were firing off in the same direction. The lid was obviously coming off.
I yelled at Parker. “Open up. Do what you can … fire at will!”
We found ourselves sitting on top of one of the fiercest firefights I had ever seen. We, of course, couldn't see the enemy, or whether Parker's barking 60 was knocking any of them down, but it was obvious that our twenty friendlies were holding off a much larger force … and could be overwhelmed at any second.
Four Six finally got enough of a breather to talk to me again, in a calm but noticeably apprehensive voice. “We got a lot of people down here, One Six. I shit you not, we got a whole lot of people, and they're trying to flank us. They're moving off the trail and heading northeast on our flank. My God, there's a lot of people down here!”
“Four Six, One Six. How many people have you got?”
“More than a hundred,” he answered.
I silently mimicked his, my God! This was the largest concentration of enemy troops we had ever jumped in the field. And here we were not able to shoot at them, not even able to see them as they prowled around in the jungle.
Harrell came back again. “One Six, they're definitely moving toward the northeast. They're trying to move around me on my east flank and head on up north. What in the hell is up there that they want to get to so bad?”
While airborne, scouts never had the free hands or time to even look at a map, but Harrell's question caused me to reach for mine. I cradled the collective on my knee, then reached around with my left hand to pull the chart out of its pocket, located between the two pilot seats. I probably looked like a juggler in his first talent show as I tried to watch where I was going, handle the controls, and spread out the map.
But I managed it, and my eye quickly went to the grid where the ARPs were located on the tank bust trail. Looking north of that point about two hundred yards, I saw a little stream that apparently carried runoff water down south; at that point, the stream ran mostly east and west through some pretty rough terrain. It looked to me as though the stream formed a natural obstacle that the enemy would have to cross in order to escape north to the Michelin.
I decided that was a fine place to throw in some heavy stuff. Even though it was only a couple of hundred yards from our friendlies, we could blow up everything around the stream at that point and contain the enemy's flight.
I called up the FAC to set the plan in motion. “Sidewinder Two Two, this is Darkhorse One Six. You see where the Little Blue crosses through that low area just north of the ARPs about two hundred yards?”
He answered in his now-familiar Aussie twang. “Roger, One Six. I got it.”
“OK, then,” I continued, “I've got heavy enemy troops moving that way from the south, probably a hundred or more on the run, trying to flank our friendlies and didi to the rubber. You work up your first set of fast movers and I'll make one pass over and give you a smoke.”
Sidewinder rogered, and I headed into a big sweeping right turn over the area just south of the streambed. As I looked down, I saw whole groups of underbrush and bushes, but they were moving! The “bushes” were, in fact, enemy soldiers with camouflage capes across their backs. They were obviously the lead element of enemy troops who had flanked Harrell's ARPs.
No wonder Four Six had his hands full. His little unit of twenty riflemen was all that stood between what must have been a battalion of bad guys and their otherwise open and clear flight path.
As I passed low over the stream, I yelled to Parker. “Smoke … drop the smoke … now!” and the red smoke canister was on its way.
I keyed Sidewinder. “Hit the smoke … red smoke is out. Enemy troops are moving north-northeast.”
Sidewinder came right back. “Negative smoke … negative smoke!”
I jerked my head around and looked back. Damn. Parker's grenade had dropped in the stream and gone out.
We were catching it from below, taking hit after hit in the aircraft. But there was nothing left to do but pull around and make another run over the stream to put down a good mark for Sidewinder.
This time Parker dropped two grenades to avoid a repeat of the problem. He let the spoons fly and both grenades popped in his hands before he dropped them. Parker's gloves protected his hands as the smoke poured
from the ports at the bottom of the canister. Red smoke billowed up at us as we hightailed it back toward the ARP's position.
We stayed down as low as we could, fairly brushing the treetops. I felt myself sucking down into the armor plate and tried to keep my pucker factor from totally eating the seat cushion.
Sidewinder's voice popped back into my phones. “OK, Darkhorse, we've got your marker. Get yourself clear. We're inbound with high-drag snake and nape.”
As I pulled back in over the ARPs, the whole northern area exploded into great balls of black smoke and fire. Sidewinder's fast movers had just hung a detour sign on Charlie's back door escape route.
Through the roar of explosions I suddenly heard the troop commander's voice over VHF, advising us that he was overhead in his command Huey, and that we'd soon have a supporting infantry company on the scene. The plan was to put about 150 troops on the ground, on the backside of the ARPs, engage the enemy soldiers that had flanked the ARP position, then drive the bad guys back toward their base camp.
About eight minutes later a flight of ten Hueys flew in. They descended below the tree line to my north, then took off again, apparently heading back to Dau Tieng for another load of friendlies.
Moments later, the Cobra broke in on FM. “OK, Four Six, get your heads down. Inserted unit reports fifty to seventy-five, possibly one hundred enemy troops coming your way. They have engaged and turned them around. They're now headed back toward your position on the way into their base area. They're comin' fast!”
I could tell that Harrell had read the Cobra's warning. He was crawling around to his men, checking their ammo and trying to get them better positioned to fight off the next onslaught.
The jungle below me literally exploded again with heavy firing. As predicted, the enemy soldiers were rushing back down the tank bust
in full retreat, apparently determined to take down everything that stood in their way.
The ARPs opened up with blistering fire. The enemy surged ahead, The battle became head-to-head and nearly hand-to-hand before the surge of oncoming soldiers veered off the trail to the east, trying to bypass the merciless fire of Harrell's aeroriflemen.
Their move off to Four Six's flank gave me the room I needed to shoot. I dropped down to a hover over Harrell, dumped the nose, and took aim over the heads of the ARPs, pulling the minigun trigger back to the four-thousand-rounds-a-minute stop. Kicking left and right pedals, I hosed out everything I had into the tree line. Parker was leaning out of the right side, spraying down the running enemy soldiers with 7.62.
I suddenly went dry on the minigun. Parker, just seconds later, went dry on the M-60. We had thrown everything we had at them, except for Parker's backup. In desperation, he reached back for his “Thumper” and started pumping out M-79 40mm rounds, followed by a full thirty-round magazine out of his “stowed for last resort” M-16.
As abruptly as the furor had started, it ended. There was almost dead silence, except for the whirring sound of my rotors.
I maneuvered back over the ARP's position, about twenty feet off the ground, and looked down at Harrell. He was sitting on the ground, still without his steel helmet, legs stretched out in front of him. His bleeding, grimy left arm was cradled in his lap and his jungle fatigues were black with sweat. The bolt of his still-smoking CAR-15 was in the open position, indicating that he had expended his last round and was on an empty ammo magazine.
I could hardly tell if he was dead or alive, until he finally turned his sweat-drenched face up toward me. Through his pain and exhaustion, he managed a grin.
As I smiled and waved back, he reached over to his RTO and picked up his radio mike. He looked back up at me and flashed another big, toothy grin. “Goddamnit, One Six, I think we won!”
CHAPTER 19
Final Salute
Intelligence gathered from the scene, and from the enemy bodies found in the killing zone after that free-for-all on the tank bust trail, told us several remarkable things. Among them was an explanation of the explosion under Willis's ship, which had started the whole fracas in the first place.
As One Seven suspected, it wasn't a glancing RPG round that had been fired at his aircraft. It was, rather, clever use of a CHICOM mine, the enemy's answer to our Claymore antipersonnel mine. These mines looked like big black metal frying pans and were filled with military plastic explosive and metal fragments. The enemy soldiers had jury-rigged one of them in the top branches of a tree, right in the center of their newly constructed, heavily fortified, and well-concealed base camp area. Their idea was that when an aeroscout hovered over the tree trying to look down through the jungle to find an enemy base camp, they'd blow the mine by remote control and get themselves a U.S. chopper.
They almost did. They did succeed in giving Rod's aircraft a hell of a jolt, plus wounding Joe Cook in the hand with one of the mine fragments.
Papers found on enemy bodies told us something else—something that, even in light of all the casualties taken by the ARPs, was damned happy news for the 1st Division. The newly established enemy base camp belonged to none other than the infamous Dong Nai Regiment—the tough, elusive, hard-core NVA regulars we had been trying to pin down for months.
It was determined to be an enemy force of between one hundred fifty and two hundred troops. On that particular day, they had run up against twenty-eight men of the aerorifle platoon, and had gotten their noses bloodied in the process.
The ARPs had been outnumbered ten to one, and had it not been for the tenacity they exhibited that day, like so many other times before in the field, the Dong Nai would have gone through them “like crap through a goose,” as General Patton supposedly said during World War II. The ARP casualties were extremely heavy, and came right on the heels of their terrible losses in the Huey LZ mine incident just days before. But these twenty-eight men, with an effective fighting force of only about twenty, prevailed against the toughest regular North Vietnamese Army outfit we knew about.
The 1st Division was anxious to deliver the coup de grace. We had hurt the Dong Nai badly up on the tank bust trail, but they were still a viable force. We wanted to put them out of commission for good.
Hoping to catch the rest of the regiment at home in their bunkers, division set up an Arc Light to hit a suspected jungle base area just south of the Michelin. The target for the B-52 strike was a grid “box” on the ground, two kilometers wide by five and a half kilometers long. We knew that this area contained a number of bunkers, connecting trenches, antiaircraft machine guns, and—we hoped—the remnants of the Dong Nai.
The “Big Belly” B-52 Stratofortresses were equipped with multiple ejector racks capable of carrying up to forty-two iron bombs, each weighing 750 pounds. The airplanes were to fly in from their base in Guam, unload their explosives into our designated box of eleven square kilometers, then head back home.
We had a hunter-killer team waiting at FSB Kien to do a BDA of the area just as soon as the B-52s finished their business. I was the designated scout, Parker was my Charlie Echo, and Bruce Foster was my gun.
At the precise stipulated moment, the Arc Light rained down. The three B-52s, so high that they were invisible from the ground, had been guided into our little grid box by radar. The explosions, even from our distance at Kien, were tremendous, almost as if we were standing right next to a rapid-firing 105. I thought about what it must have been like to be in that box, then put the idea quickly out of my mind.
With word that the last bomb was down, we headed out to take a look. I dropped low and looked down at the smoldering ruins through the gray dust that still hung heavily in the air. I was quickly convinced that absolutely nothing could have lived through that holocaust.
We saw nothing but huge bomb craters, stripped and shredded trees, and the remains of enemy bunkers that had either been blown sky-high or collapsed inward by the blasts. Any form of life surely had been pulverized.
I concluded that an Arc Light strike was the most terrifying sight a man could obser
ve in war. Grimacing from the sight, I was ready to pull the plug and get out of there, leaving that awful grisliness behind. Then, suddenly … almost inconceivably … we began taking AK-47 fire.
I jerked my head left and right, looking for the source. My God, I thought, I don't believe this. There they were—muzzle flashes coming from a partially caved-in bunker that had incredibly missed being totally destroyed by the bombs. Whoever was on the other end of that assault rifle was mad as hell, and determined to take me down. His fire was sustained and accurate.
As I swung around to meet his challenge, the man broke from the bunker ruins and dove into one of the B-52 bomb craters, with Parker's rounds hot on his tail. He was bare chested except for his ammo pouch and was carrying his AK-47.
I keyed Foster. “Believe it or not, I've got one live enemy soldier down here. He was in one of the blasted-out bunkers and has now ducked into a crater. We're going to take him out and then I'll be right back with you.”
Foster rogered, figuring that I couldn't expect much trouble from one bomb-blasted enemy soldier hiding in an open B-52 crater.
I swung around over the caved-in bunker, which was at the edge of the crater. As I came in over the lip of the crater, the soldier started shooting again. He was putting out more fire on me than I was giving him back. This guy was going to put up a fight.
Every time I hovered over the crater to get him, he'd fire a long, point-blank burst, then disappear back into the crater. I couldn't tell where he was going.
I backed off again, and decided to make a fast pass over the crater so I could look for his hiding place. He managed to let me have another burst, and some of his rounds hit the aircraft. But I was able to spot a hole in the side of the crater, right underneath the rim. After the soldier ripped off shots at me, he was jumping back into that little hole where I couldn't see him.
“Damn it, Jimbo,” I said to Parker, “get him. When he sticks his head out, get him, before he gets us with one of those bursts.”