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 not 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.

The flight engineer lay on his belly on the stretcher from where he watched the red drums as they swung beneath the Chinook. He would be holding a smoke grenade, and as the sling opened, he would pull the pin. As the red drums began their fall, he would count, “one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three” and on the third beat he would throw the smoke grenade down through the hellhole after the red spinning drums and toward the green earth.

The impact of the fall would rupture the red drums among the green forest, sending the jellied gasoline in a wide splashing arc, the gasoline fumes rising very quickly to meet the burning smoke grenade arriving three seconds after the drums hit. No more red drum, red drum, green forest, but now just a brighter red with orange in it, flame red, and then black smoke turning gray as it rose above the green forest.

If you knew you were going to be shot at or even thought it possible, the drop would be from much higher, 1,500 feet or more to stay above the small arms or light machine-gun fire looking for the napalm drums swinging below your aircraft. Accuracy was not too important in either case. Napalm, as dropped from Chinooks, was an “area” weapon, not a “point” weapon like a rocket would be. Smoke grenades would not work from 1,500 feet; dropping from that height, more often than not, they missed hitting the fumes of the napalm. Instead, the Cobras that came with you on hot missions would play their miniguns over the ruptured drums—1,500 rounds a minute and every fifth round a tracer. There would be a stream of red, like water from a garden hose, into the green forest and then red orange and black gray over the green.

Today we would be shot at. It was easy to tell. The mission was clearing mines near the DMZ, always NVA there, and because of that, the mission sheet told me I would have two Cobras for cover and a LOACH to mark targets for my two Chinooks. We knew we would be shot at. We were not picking up at Evans, but at another base further north and closer to the DMZ, which would reduce turnaround times between loads.

At the appointed time, all five aircraft arrived at the PZ, actually a small landing zone (LZ) named after a marine killed near here three years ago. Both Chinooks and the LOACH landed while the Cobras circled overhead. The Chemical Corps captain that was commanding the mission came onboard and reviewed what we were going to do. We didn’t shut down the helicopters for a brief since all of us had done this many times before, so we left our copilots holding the controls while the ACs walked over to the captain to hear what he had to say. After confirming what I already knew with the captain—mines and booby trap clearance today, probably NVA in the area—I called for the first load. The other Chinook would take the second, and after two loads each, we would all fly the 20 miles back to Quang Tri for fuel and to let the Cobras and LOACH refuel/rearm.

With the load hooked, I climbed out for the target area, near the Rock Pile, a singular pillar of rock that stood in a valley between the first row of mountains before you got to the high plateau leading to Laos. Two years before, the marines had seen heavy fighting around the Rock Pile and now it was the Army’s turn. QL9, the main east-west road, wound beneath me as the Chinook and its red drums swinging below flew past. Dash two, the second Chinook would pick up its load and follow in five minutes. As I passed over the first ridgeline, a grunt called me over the fox mike, “Hook over the Rock Pile, Alpha Zulu One three, over.” He sounded excited, upset, not the usual flat tone.

For a brief second I wondered how he got our frequency, but quickly figured that if he had an SOI it wouldn’t be hard, considering there are only three Chinook companies in I Corps. You just call on all three until someone answers.

“Zulu One three, Playtex One two, go ahead,” I called in my best bored aviator voice. Death before loss of cool.

“Playtex, One three, We’re pinned down by NVA about a mile north of the Rock Pile. Can you send those Cobras with you over to help us out, over?”

Looking off to the northwest, I could see smoke on the other side of the rocks below. Concentrating on the source of the smoke, as we got closer I could see small flashes from weapons and tracers from a ragged line of armored personnel carriers (APCs), firing their machine guns to the north, and there among the vehicles, a red flash with black smoke rising after it. Then, a streak from the north toward the APCs and a flash from one of them—probably a rocket propelled grenade, an RPG.

The Chemical Corps captain had a headset on, but couldn’t hear the fox mike, so I briefed him over the ICS on what the grunts were telling me about their urgent request for fire support. Pulling my map from its place next to my seat, I pointed out to him that the area where the NVA fire was coming from was a free-fire zone. We could kill anything that moved there, people, animals, trees, anything. Anyone and anything were all NVA in a free-fire zone. Even the earth itself was the enemy in a free-fire zone.

The captain approved the mission change, and I told the grunts they would have more than Cobras coming. The grunt acknowledged, his voice under control now. The LOACH pilot and the Cobras had been monitoring the exchange. The LOACH pilot sounded near ecstasy at the thought that he would be marking targets other than just the forest canopy.

“One three, One two. They got anything heavy? They got.51’s?,” I asked the grunts.

“Negative, One two,” he replied. “We’ve seen nothing heavier than AK’s and RPGs. Maybe an RPK (a Soviet light machine gun), but no .51’s or tracers.”

Still, we would drop from 3,000 feet, I decided. Maybe the NVA were just sandbagging while they waited for the helicopters that always came when the grunts called. Maybe the grunts didn’t tell us, afraid we would go away and tell them to call for artillery support instead. The drop would be from 3,000 feet so that if they did have hidden machine guns, one of their tracers would not hit the red drums of jellied gasoline hanging below us and put the red and black smoke over the streaked green of my Chinook, leaving just a black smear in the sky as the pieces of ruined aluminum rained down on the darker green of the forest below. It would be 3,000 feet for the drop, not lower.

The Cobras knew what to do without a word being said, and sprinted ahead, lead Cobra pulling in front of Chalk two Chinook. Far below, just above the trees, I could see the little green LOACH weaving and sprinting just above the darker green trees. Even though they are slower than Chi-nooks or Cobras, LOACHs always looked much faster down there, darting about just above the trees.

The LOACH pilot was talking to the grunts on the fox mike and the grunts were firing red tracers into the area where the enemy was, to make them easier for him to find. Suddenly I saw a yellow smoke grenade come from his aircraft, and I watched as it hit the ground in one patch of jungle no different from any other. The LOACH jerked away and back toward the grunts and their APCs, as the LOACH pilot called for me to put the napalm right on the smoke.

Lead Cobra rolled in on the target ahead of me, firing 2.75mm folding-fin aerial rockets (FFARs), and 7.72mm minigun rounds streamed red from his nose turret toward the green below. As he broke hard right just above the trees, Chalk two Cobra was in rockets and miniguns, both slamming into the green to protect lead as he pulled away. As he pulled away, I was in, 70 knots level flight, not the diving 140 knots of the slim Cobras, but a fat Chinook with fifteen 55-gallon drums of napalm swinging below me in their red barrels, red over the green.

The yellow smoke of the target marker was gone now, but the smoke from the rockets marked the area clear enough for my napalm. Unlike the Cobras, I was flying parallel to the grunts instead of over them, trying to keep down any possibility that the load might hit them instead of the NVA; it needed to spread out linearly over the NVA, killing more of them with the load if possible. The patch of black smoke and green forest I picked for a release point moved under my nose, and then appeared in my chin bubble.

Pickle. A small jerk as the sling opens and the drums begin their fall.

Hold course and speed while the crew drags the sling into the aircraft through the hellhole. Behind me, I can hear the lead Cobra calling in hot. This time we did not drop a smoke grenade to light off the napalm. The lead Cobras FFARs would do that after the fumes had time to spread out enough. miniguns and 2.75mm FFAR and red, red black into the green.

The sling inside now, I push the nose over and add power speeding up to 140 knots and back to the PZ for another load. Behind me I can hear Chalk two Chinook talking to the grunts and the LOACH as he moves to drop his load. I hear the grunts telling them the first load missed. The NVA is still firing, heavier if anything, pissed that the helicopters came and they had no heavy weapons to reach us at 3,000 feet. Brave men, the NVA, to face napalm, the miniguns and 2.75mm FFAR and the grunt’s .50’s—brave men.

Fifteen minutes later, I am inbound again, another fifteen 55-gallon red drums swinging below my aircraft. Both loads have missed and the NVA are still attacking. I see much smoke from the first two drops now as I get within five miles. The Cobras are shooting less now, saving their remaining rockets and minigun ammo to light off the red drums. After my run, they will have to refuel and rearm, and the grunts will have to call for artillery until we get back. Brave men, the grunts, but they are fighting other brave men.

As I start my second run, I see the LOACH, low and fast right above the trees. I see him slow over the target, frustrated with our misses, dropping a smoke grenade right on top of the NVA troops. This time the LOACH seems to wobble in the air for a moment, then it falls spinning among the green trees, hacking into them as it goes down. I can see bits of rotor blade fly into the air. No black gray smoke, no orange red flame, the LOACH was just gone into the green.

I turn my Chinook to the right, away from the unknown situation to give things time to settle down. As I turn, I see two tiny figures, the pilot and the gunner from Little Bird running away from the green woods that hold the crash site across an open area. I see them running, running and I see tracers pouring from the American positions down into the woods, covering the two figures as they run. Both Cobras are diving now, spraying the woods with their remaining red streams of tracers. When I complete the 360 turn, the running figures are no longer visible, they must have made the lines safely. Or they are down wounded or dead among the green brush.

A breathless voice on the fox mike says, “Playtex One two, Little Bird. I went right down in the middle of the bastards. They were dodging pieces of my rotor blades. Drop right on the LOACH! Drop right on the LOACH!” there was no attempt at pilot cool in his voice, just a 19-year-old exhilarated at surviving, at being alive. Once again a LOACH had crashed without killing the crew, a characteristic that truly made it a beloved aircraft.

I complete the turn, and as I line up the Chinook with the target, I see the LOACH’s fuselage lying on its side, light green aircraft on dark green jungle as the last wisps of purple smoke from Little Bird’s grenade dissipate. As the aircraft wreckage passes under the top of the dash, I tense, ready to push the pickle switch when it appears between the rudders.

Pickle now.

Unseen to me, the front of the sling releases, the cargo net opens and the drums fall, red and red, end over end, spreading out as they drop. Again, no smoke grenade to light them, we are too high, and the drums are spread too far apart. The red drums hit the earth as the lead Cobra is in hot, his rockets leaving a white line in the sky as the last of his high ex-plosive 2.75mm FFARs hit and explode in the middle of the ruptured red drums in the green trees. White flash from the exploding rockets, then big red orange ball changing to black gray, spreading in a wide area over the LOACH and the thin purple smoke until both are quickly gone from sight.

I circle wide to the right, watching the flames and smoke above the green forest. Then secondary explosions start on the ground around the burning LOACH, small ones when seen from 3,000 feet. Flash, flash, white, red, black gray, among the red orange and bigger black gray. Three, four, now five explosions then they stop, leaving only black smoke.

“You got the motherfuckers! You got the motherfuckers! that’s their RPG rounds going off. You got them!” Little Bird yells over the fox mike. I hear the grunts yelling in the background as he speaks, happy or perhaps relieved, yells now that the NVA fire from the tree line had stopped. The NVA soldiers had withdrawn, broken contact with the Americans. Or they were dead, either way, no fire came from the tree line.

As Little Bird spoke on fox mike, the lead Cobra calls me on UHF to tell me that a Huey was inbound to pick up the LOACH pilot and gunner. I would not have to land and carry them back to their base after all. After I talk to the Chemical Corps officer, I call Chalk two Chinook and tell him to take his load back to the PZ. We would have to re-plan the original mission and start over again. The mines we originally set out to burn were still there and the mission must be done.

Six hours later, the day was done and both Chinook crews are in the Playtex Club. I am closest to the phone when it rings, so I answer.

I identified myself and hear, “Just the man I was looking for. Great job today. must have been a hell of a show,” the battalion operations officer was actually calling for me, another CW2 amongst the many in our battalion, a first, since he normally only talked officially to RLOs.

“Thanks,” I reply. “What are you talking about, sir”? We had done ten or more missions that day, including finishing the original napalm drop, and now after 12 hours in the air they had all run together in my mind.

“The napalm drop, asshole.” He replies. “You got 18 confirmed KIAs (enemy Killed in Action) and took out a big ammo bunker. The captain you had with you just wrote you up for a Silver Star.”

I didn’t say a word for a minute. I just sat there thinking about it. When I did speak, I told him it was a crock of shit. The captain just got it wrong and the battalion operations officer should just tear up the recommendation.

Silver Stars are for people who have done brave things. I did nothing brave to deserve a Silver Star that day. It is not brave to sit out of range and kill the enemy with napalm, turning men into unidentifiable things, shrunken and black against the unburned green jungle and gray ash where the flames were. If the green tracers had been reaching up for us and those drums of napalm, it might have been brave, but it is not heroic to kill men who cannot kill you in turn. The brave men were on the ground, trading shot for shot. They are not back in a bar having a beer. They are still out there, out by the Rock Pile waiting for the NVA to attack again.

That is, if we killed anyone at all. The NVA could have just given up and moved away when all the helicopters were overhead and the napalm and streams of red tracers and the rockets began to fall. Maybe killing the LOACH was enough for them. Maybe they just dropped their ammo and moved out of the area. Did anyone actually go to the burned ground and count 18 dead men? Who saw the destroyed bunker? The Chemical Corps officer must have wanted a medal and the only way he could get one was if the aircrew got one, so he wrote us up for one and was waiting for us to write him up for one. Or, he just wrote himself up for one without waiting for us to do it and turned it in to higher headquarters himself.

The battalion Ops O is incredulous as again I tell him that it just isn’t true and that he should tear up the write up. He sounded disappointed but agreed to do so.

I read, sometime after this event, that Napoleon understood decorations and medals—that he could get men to fight and die for a piece of colored ribbon. He was right, they will. But some men will also lie for them. In my remaining 22 years of service I arranged to never get another medal…