The weather has cleared overnight and it’s bright, sunny, and hot already at 0600. We are saddling up, making sure that we have all the ammo and ordnance we are going to need. We move the Yards and our equipment out to the helicopter pad and wait for the choppers to come back from the fuel and arming point. Mac and I are huddled in the TOC with Pappy Budrow, Major Slatten, and the lead pilots from the guns and slick packages. The birds will fuel up and be back in about ten minutes. We listen to Covey as he reaches the orbit point and gives us a last minute report on any activity in and around the target area. He and the trail FAC are working a pair of fast movers at a road intersection just about eight klicks from our insertion LZ. They have found a truck parked up under the canopy. This is normal activity in the DMZ and we are hoping that we can increase the bombing activity and slide our insertion in as a side bar. Maybe we can keep them so busy that we go unnoticed.
Covey comes up on the air again. We had ordered two sets of Spads with cluster bombs and hard bombs on one set, and napalm and hard bombs on the second. They are in-bound to the orbit point and should arrive about the same time we do. We have the team on two birds, and three spares which will stay at the orbit point in case a one goes down and we have to try to get out in a hurry. One of the spares has a chase medic onboard. We have SF medics as chase medics because they can do miraculous things that a normal medic wouldn’t and couldn’t do. They do things that ensure you make it to the evacuation hospital.
We get the last word from Pappy and confirm that the contingency plans for shot-down bird, team separated, team emergency, escape and evasion routes, and day letter codes are understood by all. One of the good things about launching out of Quang Tri is that both Pappy and Slatten are old hands; Pappy has been a One-Zero before. In fact, he had been a One-Zero so long ago that it was rumored in those far back times they were wearing furs and used a club as their basic weapon.
Pappy is totally devoted to getting a team in and, more importantly, getting them out. If he doesn’t have enough birds to lift the team and anyone else that might have gone down, it’s a no-go as far as he’s concerned. This is real important to us, since we rely on him as our umbilical cord. Slatten backs him 100 percent. When someone once complained about the huge number of air assets we used and had on hand, the two of them told the parties complaining that if they had a gripe take it to Chief SOG. End of bitch.
I look at Mac, who is all One-Zero at this point. We have been together long enough now that we work like a well- oiled Swiss timepiece. He does his tasks and I cover the bases. We hear the choppers coming in and everyone finishes and gets ready to mount up.
“Hey numb nuts.” We turn, thinking that Pappy has some other forgotten detail for us. He is standing by the radios monitoring the Covey channel and says, “Well, I finally have a plan to make sure you don’t disturb the tranquility of my camp.” He grins evilly, reaches up and turns the radio off. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. If I can’t hear you sniveling, I won’t be bothered about having an attack of conscience, and sending perfectly good aircraft and crews out there to get all shot up trying to rescue you.”
He’s still grinning as we go out to the pad and get into our equipment. Real funny guy that Budrow, but at this point it fails to relax me. I’ve got a knot in my gut, like every time we get on these choppers. No, let me correct that, I get a knot in my stomach when we go into isolation in Da Nang, and by the time we are at the launch site I look all twisted up like a strychnine victim. I don’t care how many times you do this; the fear is a gripping, gnawing, animal eating at your insides. It’s how you handle it, and then force yourself to keep going, that determines if you can make the mission happen. By the time you get to this point you are so chewed up inside you want to get in and make it happen rather than live another day of this gut-wrenching anticipation of disaster.
We are lucky. Sounds crazy, but it’s a fact. We have stayed alive a long time. We have what only combat veterans can explain, and only to their peers, because it doesn’t make sense to a layman. We are lucky. That luck is based on the fact that the team is competent beyond comprehension. When we do make contact we react like a single-celled organism. Our only hope of survival is that we can maul whoever is unlucky enough to run into us so bad that they back off and gasp long enough for us to find terrain we can hold and work the air cover. The enemy is just like us. You hurt them bad enough and they have to get their balls back before they come again. Down here at ground level it is reality, the mechanics of war that make the rules. It is a bunch of guys in different uniforms; all with one prime directive, survive.
Cuman and the other Yards have been fighting for five, six, even ten years. I have come to know them and respect them as the finest combat troops in the world. Hell, Bong, who is in his late forties, had originally fought with the Legionnaires in Force 36 during the Indochina war. It’s amazing. His English is good enough, but he speaks German better. Most of the B.P.E. of the Legion had been Germans trying to escape persecution after WWTI. France took them in by the hundreds. Five years in the Legion and you got French papers, clean slate. So Bong had learned German when he had been a teenage striker with them.
I have Xaung and two others on my ship. Xaung is our tail gunner on the team and, though only 15, is a seasoned fighter. He has an ESP about when we are going to get hit. He reaches out and touches me, usually just before all hell breaks out. He looks at me now, shrugs, reaches over and pats my arm, then grins at me. He knows that I am getting skittish about his habit of touching me and the usual consequences that ensue, so he is having a laugh at my expense. Comics surround me today.
I put on the headset as the bird gains power, then the nose drops and we start lifting forward and up. I can see Mudhole’s team coming up to the pad. They will be our Bright Light if we get in a world of shit. We are rising and banking to the left, accompanied by the first four sets of Cobras, who will prep the LZ with nails and hard rockets, then cover us until we get clear and are moving on the ground.
As we pass over the TOC Budrow leans out, grinning like a Cajun looking at a crawdad, and makes the “turning off the radio” motion again, then gives me the thumbs up. I wish I had enough bile left to throw up on him.
It takes about 30 minutes to get to the orbit point. As we come up on it I am listening to the radio chatter as Covey is working over the area to the south and setting the stage for us to drop in and insert. Mac has arranged that we will go in and flare at the base of the old calderas. He will then throw out a Nightingale device. This is a three-foot by four- foot device that looks like a wire gate with bumps inside, like little spiders. The CIA came up with this one. It is made out of slow burning fuse and when you ignite it the fuse bums around the perimeter and down to the little clusters. These are firecrackers and M-80s, which will sound like a firefight when they go off. It actually sounds like AKs and M-16s and grenades going at it. I look over through the port side as we dip and see a pair of Cobras roll in behind a pair of Spads who drop their CBU load off to the southern end of our target box. They must have spotted something on the lower slopes. I make a mental note of the location. Never go into an area where they have dropped CBUs. Nasty little buggers, not all of them go off. They get hung up in the foliage, and just sit there until something disturbs them. Then they go off.
There are a hundred little explosions as the CBU canister spills its little babies over an elliptical pattern. Then the Cobras let loose with mini-guns and a brace of rockets each. We descend and flare out. Mac tosses the Nightingale device and we lift out and up.
Covey comes on and says we are taking ground fire from lower on the slope. Another set of Cobras drop on that location and start working it over. Our plan is to lift up the slope to where a trail cuts through the rim of the calderas. With only one set of Cobras, we will set in using a rocking horse motion so it looks like we didn’t actually set down, and the team will bail in that split second when the airspeed bleeds off just before it picks up again. It’s so effective, that if you don’t actually see the action, it looks and sounds like the birds never stop. The Cobras and air package will appear to the ground observers as the normal protective coverage for one of our extraction packages coming out.
The Cobras and all the other birds will linger and make a show of working over the area where the Nightingale is cooking off. This little aerial display might give us the edge. We had picked the LZ area because it gave us the high ground, where we could actually see the target area. Also, there is enough cover for us to hide, yet still be able to see. It will give us a good view over the junctions of the trail system going south. Intel said that a division, plus, was moving through the area. We hope to catch them with their pants down. Allow a few hours for the area to quiet down, catch them moving, and then call SPECTRE and a host of other air assets in on them, without giving away the fact that the air was being directed from the ground.
As we lift up the side of the mountain, I can see into the bowl which has eroded into a saddle between two peaks about two hundred yards across, sloping up to their tops from the trail in the center. It looks good from here: no ground fire. Everyone must be concentrating on the phantom team below. We know they have trail security elements. Covey spotted one of their bunkers at the far end of the saddle and the Cobras worked it over coming in. Yep, there it is. All that remains is a smoking hole in the ground with torn up logs and parts of a human body lying just outside the burned area.
Mac is going in. I see the lead bird touch with the back of the skids, As it rolls forward, the nose dips and by the time the front of the skids are on the ground the back is already lifting. I see Mac and the four Yards with him bail out both sides. The last one leaves the aircraft about six feet in the air because he was slow, but they are all on the ground. Then it’s our turn.
We aren’t even on short final when I hear the pilot screaming, “Abort! Abort!” I look down where Mac landed and get sick to my stomach. He is lying on his back and right next to him is the trap door to a bunker concealed right at the crest of the trail. He has fallen on it and plugged the door.
There are two NVA trying to crawl out of a side entrance and the Yards shoot them. Worse yet, I can see about fifteen other likely bunkers up-slope on the opposite side. I am standing on the skid and I feel the ship start to gain power. I instinctively know that they are going to abort and pull up, which will leave Mac with too few men to save himself. I slam the barrel of my CAR-15 in the back of the pilot’s helmet and scream into the mike, “Put this fucking bird down where he is, NOW!” He chops power. We slam into the slope and we all jump or are thrown clear. I land heavily. When I hit the ground my ears feel like I just ripped them off. I still had the headset on when I jumped. The bird screams loudly as it winds up and is gone.
Immediately I get the Yards in some sort of fighting perimeter where we can at least hold on or fight our way to better ground. I run up in a crouch and Mac says, “Why did you land? I told them to abort.”
“There are bunkers all over the hill to our right and eight of us can fight a lot harder than five,” I yell back.
He grabs the radio handset. “Go tie in the team and let me bring in some air.” I work my way down-slope when I see Xam Pot stand up and fire methodically six times like he’s on the rifle range. He is standing upright, just like we did at the range; it is almost amusing, because he looks like a poster child for the NRA. I think he’s shooting at nothing. He is new on the team and this is his first mission. I yell at Bop and Thua to see what he’s firing at. A grenade goes off over by where Thua is and he yells at the team because he thinks one of the team has thrown it and it fell short. I run over to where Xam Pot is and down the trail I see the crumpled bodies of three NVA with a whole shitload of canteens on bamboo poles lying amongst their bodies. They had just walked up the trail; he just stood up yelled something like “Hey!” and dropped all three. That’s pretty good discipline, or he just got lucky. We are starting to take ground fire now and the tempo is picking up. I run back up- slope. Well, I trudge up-slope. I need the team to tie in closer and I am working my way back up to where Mac is beside the bunker.
Nearby I can see a group of NVA in green khakis break from cover by some rocks to his left front. They start to try to flank him. Cuman and Bong drop all but three, who make it into a small wash below Mac. Cuman throws a grenade down into it just as a stick grenade comes lofting out of the wash and lands where Mac is and explodes. I hear Mac scream, “God damnit!” Panicked, I push to get up the hill. I can’t see anything lying on the ground, and I’m trying to get everybody in tighter. I get to Bop and he is firing the grenade launcher uphill at what looks like a platoon, plus, group of NVA setting up to fire and maneuver down toward us. I dump three magazines at them and between the two of us we make them go to ground.
I have to get to the radio. If Mac is down I’m going to need to get Covey in here as fast as possible and get us some air. I get to within about ten yards of Mac and I can see him. He is on his back with his pants down to his knees and he has the handset cupped in the crook of his shoulder. I can’t see any blood, but he has his genitalia cupped in both hands. The little pervert! This is the coolest and craziest man I have ever seen. We are in a world of shit and he is masturbating?
I get up to him and he looks up at me and yells that I am drawing fire. Is there some reason I am walking around? Right. We’ve got more problems than my running around in plain view while you worry about damage to your nut sack. I can see that he is bleeding inside his left thigh. Obviously the shrapnel from the grenade had nicked him. He looks at me like, “Well, I’m wounded…” as if that was an excuse to have his pants down. I take the handset from him and I can hear Covey asking for a sit-rep. I yell into the handset that we are in a hornet’s nest, but they will have to wait because my One-Zero is busy playing with himself and it looks like they shot one of his balls off. He grabs the handset, frowns at me like I told on him, and starts giving Covey the situation whilst trying to pull up his britches.
We both look up-slope to our east and the platoon we had driven to ground has been joined by about ten more stalwart lads and is getting ready to assault us. The Yards are dropping them like they were ducks in a shooting gallery, but the small arms fire isn’t slacking off at all. We are getting heavy fire from both slopes now and I can count at least six bunker openings with muzzle flashes. Some of them are only forty yards away. Mother McRae, this is bad, bad, bad. We are tucked into a wash so they can’t really get at us, but if they can lay enough fire on us they will be able to make us keep our heads down. Then they will hit us with B-40s and rush us. That will be the end of RT Habu, the end of my dreams of becoming President, and any dreams I have of ever becoming a porno star.
Mac yells down at me, “The guns are on the way and the slicks are about ten minutes out. Hang on!” Oh no, Red Ryder, I think I will just give up. Maybe they won’t put me in a tiger cage with someone who is more interested in his future as a breeding stud.
Crump! Crump! The high explosives go off to the west about 50 meters. Oh great, someone brought a mortar to the party! How novel, now we are really fucked. They can reach us in the wash with that. I’m trying to figure some great tactical wizardry that will allow me to get out of this alive, but all I can come up with is becoming invisible. I look over at the torn bodies of the two NVA we shot coming in. I am wondering if I can fit into one of the uniforms and slip away in the crowd.
I remember reading how some plainsman had escaped from a war party of Sioux by crawling inside a horse carcass and concealing himself. I look around. Nope, there aren’t any horse carcasses here, but there are plenty of pissed off Indians and they are starting to get organized. I hear the unmistakable “brrrrrrp” of a Minigun, and the slope in front of me erupts, causing bunches of the green khaki tribe go down. Rockets and 40mms start hitting the slope to our rear.
I have my URC-10 emergency radio on and I can hear Covey talking to another ship that has been hit and gone down. The crew is out and slicks from the package are dropping in to pick them up. The Cobras bank up and to the right and a pair of Spads come in, guns chewing up the real estate.
“Get down! Nape!” Mac yells. I didn’t see the canister drop, but then a rolling fire storm erupts in front of us and envelopes any of the survivors of the assault force who were splashing into the bunkers. There is a blast of heat behind me and I can hear someone screaming. It is too far away to be one of us. Fry, you little rice-eating ant. Napalm sucks oxygen out of the area making it hard to breathe. I don’t notice because when I’m scared shitless I have a tendency to hyperventilate, so oxygen is not yet a problem. The mortar has stopped so maybe we got lucky.
Mac yells out over the ground fire, “Choppers coming, short final. Take the first bird, get everyone on. Covey says there are a lot more of them moving up the slope behind us. We gotta go.” Now that is an understatement.
The first slick comes in and slams down about ten yards from me. I run toward it and start throwing little people onboard. I am about to dive in when it is suddenly up and gone. I stand there, momentarily, with feelings of despair, betrayal, and a big “oh shit.” However, I haven’t got time for hurt feelings. I have to get back to where Mac is or they will leave me here and all these pissed off people will blame me for ruining their lunch hour. I run over to Mac and the second bird slams into the ground almost on top of us. We dive inside, Cuman lands on top of us, and we start to lift.
The door gunners on both sides are burning their guns out on full auto and they have plenty to shoot at. The NVA are trying to get right on top of us because the guns and the Spads are killing everything except what is about twenty yards from the chopper we are on. You can feel the rounds hitting the chopper, a staccato metal thunk, thunk, thunk. From where I am lying on the floor, I can see an NVA officer running at us with a pistol and yelling at his men. Shit, this boy must have watched too many war movies. I wonder how he can run that fast, having such big balls. I can’t get my gun up because I’m half laying on it, so I just pull the trigger and let it rip. We are lifting and I can’t see if I got him. A grenade flies in. Mac kicks at it and it tumbles out the side of the bird. Another grenade bounces off the gunner’s helmet and falls out. The gunner swats at his face with one hand, like he was shooing away some nasty bug, but keeps burning up the gun with one long, continuous burst. The engines are screaming up to full power and I can see rounds chewing up the overhead and the inside of the bird. Then we are up and away. There is another sudden rush of hot air from ordnance going off real close, and the chopper jumps up from the concussion. But we are still gaining altitude, pulling free and getting some sky, getting up and beyond the 12.5mms and all those other weapons trying to pull us back down.
I look back and the mountain is alive with explosions going off. In the distance you can see more jets and aircraft stacking up for their chance. Every fighter jock in Southeast Asia that has both ordnance and fuel is coming over for a drop. Some of them are down to minutes of airtime so Covey is working them first. As we get farther and farther from the battle, I look back at the half moon shape of the caldera we had been in. It is getting pasted from the air by everything from Cobras to F-4s and Skyraiders. The zoomies will need a couple of extra hands each to tell this story at the club tonight. There is enough aircraft zinging around up there to create a traffic jam.
I am half-lying on the floor with my back braced against the stanchion behind the pilot, watching this entire tableau recede. Mac has the headset on. All our people are out. We hear Covey say that they got the crew of the gunship that was knocked down and they are starting to get secondary explosions in the calderas and the surrounding area. Marvelous. Blow the whole bloody thing up.
Forty minutes, plus, and we are sweeping over the Fifth Mech base and then wallowing into short final until we are down. We had been on the ground for about an hour and change. The first person I see is Mudhole and he is sitting under a brightly colored beach umbrella. He is naked except his boots and a panama hat, beer in hand. Then I see Pappy and Slatten heading our way with the medic. They grab Mac and the medic is trying to look at his wound. I vaguely hear Slatten saying, that’s it, good job, and that we will be going back to Da Nang tomorrow.
Mac is calm, cool, and collected, like always. Pappy hands him a beer and holds out two steel ball bearings, big ones. “Here, you might need these. Your One-One says they shot your balls off.” That’s right, pamper the little gator excrement. While we were out there about to get turned into victims, I distinctly heard Mac, the Combat Midget, on the radio. At the height of every pissed off Nguyen in the world shooting at us, Covey was asking if we were declaring a Tactical Emergency. Mac’s response? “How does it look from where you’re at?” I’m going to shoot him.
I see some Air Force light colonel with Slatten and he’s staring at me and the rest of us as if we are aliens. Then I remember I’m wearing Uncle Otto’s German helmet with the SS runes on the side. I remember that we had joked about it maybe giving us a couple of extra seconds if some NVA saw me and pondered whose side the Germans were on. Hey, it might have worked.
Actually, if we ever have to go back there again, I am wondering about the feasibility of getting our hands on a full dress, Russian General’s uniform, or even a 55 gallon drum of vanishing cream.
I snap back to reality when Budrow instructs us to get our team chowed down. The operations are closed for the day; we are lucky more rain is moving in. I snap my heels together and scream, “Zu Befehl! Herr Scharfuhrer!” and march off in my best Prussian manner. The Air Force guy looks me over and then looks at Budrow and Slatten. They shrug as if to say, “Don’t pay any attention to him.” I hope that guy is the weatherman; I’m going to get drunk and see if he wants to buy some good war stories.
Mac comes plodding up and grabs my arm. “Well, we got out of there, didn’t we?” I love the little Alabama gator bait. Talk about the master of the obvious. I hope his balls swell up; maybe we will get an extra couple of days stand down if they do.
Mac continues. “You have to quit walking around like that when you are under fire or someone is going to think you’re brave or something. You know we have been able to convince Captain Manes that you are too dull-witted to take over a team by yourself, but if they mistake dimwitted for brave they are going to break us up.”
Yep, that’s the Mac, always looking out for me. I see him doing the same thing, walking around in the middle of a firefight, at least when he isn’t tripping over something and falling down. But the latter part of that statement is indeed true; I’ve caught Manes eyeing the two of us with that look. We’d better be careful.
We go by and see the Yards. They are out of their gear, and we get the usual nose touch, cheek sniff, pats on the arm, accompanied by grins. The mugging follows this, where we give them cash to buy stuff like beer, cigarettes, etc. They have the fetus of the deer we shot yesterday cooking in a pot already and we are to come back and eat with them.
Then it’s drop the equipment, and go over to the mess shack/club for some cold beer. Mac looks at me and says it’s a good thing we got out when we did bud, because he was down to about eight magazines. Same here, it had been real close. The good thing was that we had made it and wouldn’t draw that target again until at least someone else ran it. The next mission in there would probably be a Bomb Damage Assessment mission. They would probably carpet bomb the whole area then send in a team to see what was still walking around.
We close out the night with the Yards, mildly drunk, eating the venison. Once you get past how they cooked it, the entree is delicious. They make fun of my skills as a hunter as we prepare the blasted piglet and what’s left of his siblings. The Yards tell me to take a crossbow next time so there will be more meat. Ah, life is good; I am alive and I’m with my tribe of little head-hunting killers. I love them. I am drifting with contentment, almost dream-like, when I realize the little shits have been cooking with herbs again.