I took a seat on one of the benches that run on either side of the fuselage so that the cargo can be loaded in the middle. The plane took off, heading north. I was jazzed. I’d already found two of my guys. I was thinking, This is going to be a bunt! I was hoping I would find Rick, and soon. I didn’t have much time left.
I was sitting next to two young soldiers. We started talking—yelling, actually—over the din of the engine. They had been wounded and were now returning from the hospital to be sent back into combat. They didn’t ask me any questions.
I asked them, “Do you know where Bravo Company is?”
“Me and my buddy are in Bravo Company,” one kid answered.
“I’m looking for a guy in Bravo Company named Rick Duggan.”
“Sergeant Duggan?” the more outgoing GI asked.
“That’s him,” I answered.
“He’s in our company,” he offered.
“Well, I’m a friend of his from the old neighborhood,” I said, “and I’ve come over here to bring him a beer.”
I still had about ten cans of New York’s finest left in my pack after the encounter with Kevin McLoone. I had bought some popular American brands at the base in Qui Nhon, which I drank myself. Hey, it was hot over there, and I was thirsty! But I wanted to save the cans I’d brought from home for my buddies.
The two young GIs looked at each other, and the slightly older, friendlier one burst out laughing. He thought it was funny, but the younger guy wanted nothing more to do with me. If he could have bailed out of that plane and onto another one in midair, he would have. He thought I was going to be trouble, but thank God I didn’t turn out to be. At least not for him. That I know of.
“Do you guys know where you’re headed?”
“No,” said the friendly one. “They never tell us.”
“Well, I hope you don’t mind if I follow you, then.”
“Yes, we do mind!” said the wary kid. “We don’t want to have anything to do with you! Jack, stop talking to him.”
That only made Jack laugh even harder. I wanted to hand him a beer. But I don’t blame the cautious kid. He couldn’t help it. I was still in dungarees and the plaid sports shirt. My hair was getting a little long around the edges. I hadn’t had a shower, or shaved, or had a haircut since I disembarked. You might even say I was unkempt.
The suspicious GI looked to be about eighteen years old maximum, and he’d already been wounded and sewn up and was now being sent back to the jungle. He’d probably grown up in a town with more cows than people, and he didn’t know what the hell was going on. I hoped he’d make it back to that little town all right.
The plane landed at Phu Bai, a major military airfield on the coast, ten miles south of the old imperial city of Hue.
In 1965 General Westmoreland had ordered a thousand marines to dig and fill thousands of sandbags to establish a camp there. They did so in thirty days. Then the four-star army general, who prior to the Vietnam War had been a highly respected veteran of both World War II and the Korean War, changed his mind and sent many of those marines up to the Con Thien and Cam Lo combat bases, only two and four miles, respectively, from the DMZ. Westmoreland, believing that the main objective of North Vietnam’s military leader, General Vo Nguyen Giap, was to seize the northern provinces, had just sent other leathernecks, disastrously, to remote Khe Sanh, against the wishes of the top marine commanders. Westmoreland then expanded the presence of the army into the beachside camp at Phu Bai, and ever after, the marines claimed they had built an Acapulco for the GIs.
We got off the plane, and I followed the two GIs, hanging back maybe twenty, thirty feet. They got into the back of a PC—a personnel carrier—joining two other soldiers. As soon as it started moving, I caught up and ran alongside, then gave it a hit. It screeched to a stop. I hopped in the back, banged it twice, and off we went. Those were the international signals: one for stop, two for go.
All the young GIs were now staring at me except for Jack, who winked at me conspiratorially. As we wended our way north through the hills, it struck me again what a beautiful place Vietnam was—like the Great Smoky Mountains, only hotter. It had huge trees in the forest, even evergreens. Crazy-crowned hoopoe birds, drongos with their bandit masks, and blue-Mohawked kingfishers trilled and zipped among the teak trees as tall as ship masts, and the jackfruit trees laden with fruits that could weigh a hundred pounds. They didn’t smell so good, but the fragrant frangipani flowers all along the way made up for it. I felt at peace for one moment—until the scream of a forest eagle owl totally spooked me. It sounded like a woman crying for help somewhere deep in the woods; no wonder the Vietnamese consider an encounter with one to be a bad omen.
We wound up at an old French country church. Nothing was around it but an old cemetery they called Landing Zone Tombstone. There were sixteen, eighteen helicopters, all parked up the hillside. Apparently, they’d arrived only that afternoon.
Jack told me to hitch a ride with them on one of those helicopters to Landing Zone Jane before sunset to catch up with Bravo Company. I knew they would lead me right to Rick; I had to stick with them.
I walked into the Operations tent and said casually to the corporal at the table, “Got a chopper going up to LZ Jane at 1800 hours?”
He looked a little perplexed but answered, “Yes, sir!”
“Okay,” I said. “Put my name on the manifest.”
The GI said, “Um . . . um, what’s your rank, sir?”
“I’m a civilian,” I said.
“A civilian, sir?” he said. “You really have to speak to the major about this.”
The major walked into the tent, talking with another officer. The GI waited to get his attention and then explained the situation.
The major turned to me and said, “You want to go to LZ Jane? Where are you coming from?”
“From down south, sir,” I said. “I’ve got to see someone at LZ Jane.”
I wasn’t keeping it vague on purpose, but it worked in my favor.
“I see . . .” said the major, and he gave me a knowing look. It was the CIA Effect, working its magic again.
“Okay, right. I understand. Corporal, put Mr. Donohue on the list.”
“Did you eat yet?” he asked me, and I said I hadn’t. So, the major put his arm around me, led me to the mess tent, and we had dinner together.
During the meal, he told me all about what had been going on up there. I couldn’t believe I was sitting there dining with a major. I went into the marines a private, and four years later, I came out a private. But I was a four-star general when it came to slinging BS. At one point, he leaned over and asked furtively, “Can you tell me a little bit about what’s going on?”
“Sure, I’d be glad to,” I said. “See, I have a stepbrother, Rick, who’s in Bravo Company, and I’m going to bring him a beer.”
With that, he burst into laughter and shook his head.
“You guys from Saigon are all alike!” he said. “You keep everything to yourselves!”
Then it was 1800 hours—time to go. I thanked the major and headed to the chopper pad.
The two returning GIs and I climbed aboard the chopper, a Bell UH-1 Iroquois—a “Huey”—heavily armed, with guns on both sides. In all my years in the marines, I had been in a helicopter only once, when I was medevacked out of the Vieques Naval Training Range in Puerto Rico after a jeep accident during maneuvers. Medical evacuation was one of the primary uses of choppers at first. Though the US Army bought its first Sikorsky in 1941 and used a chopper for the first time in WWII to rescue downed airmen in Burma three years later, the military relied primarily on paratroopers airdropped from planes to perform such rescues in WWII. In the Korean War, rotary aircraft were used mostly for reconnaissance, supply, or medical evacuation of the wounded, like any fan of the TV show M*A*S*H would know. There were a few paratrooper drops in Vietnam—Jimi Hendrix even completed parachute training at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, but never got to Vietnam since he was honorably discharged, because, as one of his commanding officers said, “his mind apparently cannot function while performing duties and thinking about his guitar” at the same time.
But there was only one mass jump: Operation Junction City, involving 845 paratroopers over eighty-two days in 1967 in search of what was thought to be a hidden headquarters of the Vietcong. Meanwhile, there were nearly twelve thousand US helicopters flown by forty thousand pilots, and our allies the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) had its own fleet, engaging in combat, landing and taking off from places where only paratroopers could reach before. Vietnam was the first helicopter war.
You fly with the doors wide open, and I have to admit, about halfway to Pleiku, I was scared. We were headed to Hai Lang up in Quang Tri Province, less than an hour from the DMZ. We were not over friendly territory.
Now, a little thing I did not know about choppers is how much the wind rushes inward. And I must confess, I passed gas. The pilots and the GIs made a big deal of it; I guess it was bad.
So, the pilot cut off the engine. He yelled, “Okay, everybody out now! This is unbearable!”
And we started to drop. I thought we were going to crash into enemy territory. I was totally freaking out. Then the pilots looked at each other and started roaring with laughter. They turned the engine back on, and we swooped up. They’d been busting my chops.