FOUR MONTHS AFTER leaving Laos I decide to dig out the history of the Huey that RE-1 so carefully excavated. It proves difficult: Bill Forsyth is able to dig up little on 69-16654 in the joint task force’s records; the “Gold Book,” a compendium of history and statistics on most army helicopters in Vietnam, has nothing on it. I make inquiries of the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association, which maintains its own database on Vietnam-era choppers. I get nowhere.
But Texas Tech University keeps a large Vietnam War archive, and in its collection of Lam Son 719 records is a thick report prepared by army major general Sidney B. Berry on air operations during the invasion. Attached to the report are appendices on combat damage, and there I find 654. The records show that it was shot down within two hundred yards of our excavation site at 1 P.M. on March 20, 1971, and that it was a slick attached to the 174th Assault Helicopter Company, one of the many units that, along with Jack Barker’s company, pulled South Vietnamese troops from LZ Brown.
Veterans of the 174th maintain a Web site, which I examine for any mention of the helicopter. It is not listed in a roster of the company’s machines. With fading hope I troll the rest of the Web site’s pages, and on one devoted to the war stories by and about the 174th’s veterans, I find a link titled “The Shootdown of CPT Peterson and his Crew.” I click on it. An April 16, 1971, story from Southern Cross, a military newspaper, appears on the screen:
QUANG TRI, (23rd Inf. Div. IO)—“I broke the ship to the right and pulled in pitch to get more power and speed and, as I did that, my rotor pin [RPM] just slowed down, and I knew we were going down,” Captain Donald A. Peterson recalled.
“The next thing I remember, the ship was on its side in a heavily-wooded area on the slope of the hill, and I remember thinking, ‘Got to get out of here, maybe there’s a fire.’ I grabbed my M-16 and crawled out of the ship and saw the ship was intact, and my crew was in good shape.”
Captain Peterson, of Cut Bank, Mont., recounts the crash of his UH-1H (Huey) helicopter, a crash that left him and his three-man crew stranded on a Laotian hillside fifteen miles due west of the giant American base at Khe Sanh for more than three tension-wracked hours.
Units of the 1st ARVN Regiment were being moved back across the border from Landing Zone Brown and helicopters of the 14th Combat Aviation Battalion (CAB) had been called in to complete the extraction.
“We had all the troops out when the last chopper out radioed that a litter patient had been left behind,” Peterson, an aircraft commander, recalled.
“I was about a half a mile behind the lead chopper, and I rolled in and called our air mission control chopper to tell him we were going down to get him.”
The pick-up zone (PZ) lay in a thickly-wooded area along a bluff at the bottom of a ridgeline.
“When we started down, everything went real fine until we got to the edge of the PZ and I threw the ship into a flare maneuver to come to a stop,” he continued. “That’s when we started to receive very heavy AK-47 fire.”
“There was a big explosion underneath the ship just before we started to go down,” noted the door gunner, Private First Class Jimmy L. Graham of Houston.
“We took hits in the transmission and there was hydraulic fluid and transmission fluid pouring all over me. With all the red liquid running down my flight suit, I thought I was hit.”
“When we went down I wasn’t really thinking about anything, because my M-60 had jammed and I was working on that,” said Specialist Four Darold A. Berger of Waukon, Iowa, the crew chief.
“When I saw we were going to crash, I reached for my M-16 and the next thing I knew, we were surrounded by green. I climbed out of the bird without much difficulty because I had my seatbelt unfastened since Graham and I were going to have to jump out of the bird to get the wounded ARVN we were after.”
The crash had twisted the barrel of Graham’s M-60 into the shape of a pretzel.
“If I had my seatbelt fastened, I probably would have been pinned in,” the door gunner mused.
“The four of us laid low outside the chopper for a few minutes,” Peterson said. “Then I reached inside and switched off all the electrical equipment and we made our way through the trees and bushes to within 50 feet of a dried-up creekbed at the bottom of the slope.
“We didn’t want to go down to the creekbed because we thought if we could use it, the NVA could just as well be using it.”
“I turned my survival radio on and called for help for about ten minutes,” he continued.
“I told him we didn’t know our exact location and they radioed that they were trying to get a dustoff (medical) chopper for us, and then we broke off commo.”
The Americal chopper crew tried as best they could to remain concealed in a thicket. As they silently lay there, Berger spotted an NVA soldier walking down the creekbed about 50 yards from them with a brand new AK-47 slung down from his shoulder.
“He walked by us,” Peterson explained, “but when he was some 20 to 30 feet from us, he turned around and looked up, and it was quite obvious he realized things weren’t quite right.”
“When I saw that NVA soldier walking down the creekbed, as far as I was concerned, he could keep on going and I’d keep on minding my own business,” commented Warrant Officer Chester C. Luther of Brockton, Mass., co-pilot.
But the enemy troop did not budge, and the American helicopter crewmen kept their rifles trained on him all the while. When he started to raise his weapon, they opened fire on him.
“He had a weird, sort of resigned look on his face just before he caught the first rounds,” remarked Graham.
“After we killed him, we moved back up to the aircraft and sat there for a couple of hours while I continued to call over the radio,” Peterson said.
The whirl of approaching helicopter blades lifted the crew’s spirits as Peterson picked up a call from the pilot of a 223rd CAB chopper requesting him to pop a smoke grenade so he could get a fix on their location.”
“All I had were some pin flares,” Peterson explained, “so I popped one and they spotted it and radioed that we were about 115 meters from the original PZ (pick-up zone). The ship came in and took some hits as he was making his final approach, and had to get out of the area fast.”
“After what seemed like an eternity,” Peterson continued, “the chopper came back and I popped another pin flare.”
“The chopper came in low level, which is a normal maneuver in that type of situation because the sound of the engine is deceiving and the bird just whizzes by anyone trying to zero in on it,” Luther explained.
Cobra gunships accompanying the mercy craft worked over suspected enemy positions with rockets and mini-guns as cover while the ship hovered three to four feet over the downed helicopter and Peterson’s crew scrambled onboard.
“As we came out, we started catching more small arms fire, so we all opened up with our 16’s.” Peterson noted.
The dustoff chopper stayed at tree-top level for about a mile as it moved down into the valley, and gained altitude very slowly for the ride back to the Leatherneck Pad at Khe Sanh.
“I was never so happy in my life as when we touched down back here,” Berger said. “We never did get the names of the crew that pulled us out there, but if they’re ever in trouble someday, I hope we’re around to pay them back.”
My attention fastens on the story’s description of the crash area, particularly the presence of the creekbed so close to the wreckage. It’s only on reading it a second time that I recognize that the crew chief’s name—Berger—matches the nametape that Randy Posey pulled out of the ground.
I find Berger still living in Waukon, Iowa, where he runs a masonry company. He is mystified that someone should have tracked him down to ask him about a frightening but ultimately inconsequential afternoon thirty years before; he recalls the incident, of course, and nails its date when I ask him for it, but though he was his chopper’s crew chief—and thus, the only member of the crew unfailingly attached to that bird—he can’t recall his wrecked Huey’s tail number.
I ask him about the lay of the land where they went down. “We were on a wooded slope,” he tells me. “It sloped down and then it got steep and went into a ravine.”
“Were any of you hurt?”
“Banged up,” he says. “Sprained ankles, light wounds. I do remember that the copilot had his mustache shot off.”
“That sounds like it would hurt,” I offer.
“Yeah,” Berger chuckles, “I think it did.”
“Do you recall whether you left any articles of clothing in the helicopter, or near it?” I ask not only because we found nametape that presumably was once attached to a shirt, but because the locals who spoke with the IE back in 1994 reported seeing a shirt when they first visited the site, two months after the shootdown.
Berger doesn’t remember. “It’s been a while,” he reminds me. “A long while.”
It takes me several days to track down a second crewman. I post a query on the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association Web site, and another veteran passes on a number for Chester “Chick” Luther, the copilot of Berger’s downed bird, the man who lost half a mustache in Laos.
Luther still lives in Massachusetts. I get his machine, and he calls me back a few days later. He doesn’t remember the tail number, either, but in open New England vowels he recounts that afternoon in detail. “That whole mission was a nightmare,” he says. “If it were on TV, no one would believe it.”
His crew had made a run into PZ Brown in the late morning, he tells me, had successfully picked up a load of South Vietnamese troops and dropped them off. The air mission commander asked for a crew to head back in to pick up one or two wounded men on stretchers. Captain Peterson, the aircraft commander, replied that his crew would do it.
“I briefed the crew as we got close,” Luther says. “I told them, ‘We’re gonna go in hot, we’re gonna do a hairy flare, and you’ve got five seconds to get out and get the guys in here. If you can’t, leave ’em, because we’re getting out.’
“So we go in, and we do a hairy flare, and the (North Vietnamese) just stepped out, in uniform—I think it was the only time I saw them in uniform—and stood there, shooting at us. They were right there. We started taking some hits, and Captain Peterson said, ‘OK, we’re going around, we’re getting out of here,’ but by that time, sirens were going and lights were flashing, and we got a mile away, maybe, before we settled into the trees.”
The helicopter rolled onto its side, and they scrambled out of the wreck and into the bushes on the sloping flank of a ravine. “I took my helmet off and put it down, and picked up my weapon,” Luther tells me. He noticed he was hurt—he was cut across the bridge of his nose and across the right side of his face, a wound that required stitches when they returned to friendly territory. The doctor’s work claimed half of his mustache. “So I didn’t get it shot off, exactly,” he says, “but yeah—I went into the PZ with a whole mustache, and at the end of the day I had half a one.”
Hunkered down in the brush, they watched the North Vietnamese soldier walk slowly down the creekbed. “That poor son of a bitch,” Luther says. “I’m a liberal Democrat, and basically I was a pacifist. I really wanted him to just keep walking.”
But he didn’t. “He looked up, and it seemed like he looked right at us for what seemed like a full minute. And my crew shot him.
“When we got back, we were all talking, and it was Don Peterson, I think, who said to me, ‘Gee, it’s too bad you didn’t get your helmet before we left.’”
I feel the hair on my neck stand on end.
Luther is on a roll. “And I said, ‘Who cares about that? I lost better stuff there—I lost a camera, and I don’t care about it. I’m glad to have got out with what I got.’
“And he said, ‘Yeah, but still, it would have been neat to have the helmet.’
“And I said, ‘Why? What’s so special about the helmet?’
“And he said, ‘Didn’t you see? Your helmet had an entry hole and an exit hole in the back of it.’”