My war had started; I was now into it. It looked like Charlie was getting up for another offensive, pushing troops across the Cambodian border. We had heard the NVA had four divisions over there in sanctuary. We sent everything we had out there to look for them, to try to pin them down, harass, interdict, and kick shit out of them. So slow before, the war dramatically picked up and was becoming a confused and dangerous madhouse atmosphere.
Pilots scheduled to fly at dawn, hoping to catch Charlie with his morning ablutions down, were up and at ’em at Apache Sunrise. It was a rule that everybody, on-duty, off-duty, or standby, had to get up and get dressed, if only in shorts and T-shirts for the ongoing volleyball game. A Spec4 from ops came over to make sure we got out of bed. His duty was to shine his flashlight in our eyes until we opened them.
“Time to get up, Lieutenant.”
“Did you wake up Captain Blue?”
“No, sir. He’s off today. Schedule says you’re flying with Mr. Farmer.”
I turned on the light, swung my feet off the bunk onto the floor and hurried to dress to get in a cup of coffee before the briefing.
The S-3 came over and conducted briefings at the TOC either in the morning or the night before. Pilots scheduled to fly were informed of the night’s activities. There had been some probing at FSB Phyllis, killing several soldiers; Blue Max flew all night, putting in air attacks. NVA dropped mortars on FSB Dot and probed the defenses with sappers; Miles as AC, aircraft commander, and Taylor would fly that area with Mosby from the White Platoon to see if they could find the tubes. A LRRP team made contact but broke off quickly without suffering casualties. Intelligence reported activity around the Dog’s Head, but that was unconfirmed.
“Intelligence?” Mighty Morris scoffed. “ Where do they get such shit? From Chinese fortune cookies?”
Two Pink Teams consisting of White Loaches and Red Cobras—white and red made pink; white, red, and blue made a Purple Team—were assigned to check out the area north of the Michelin plantation for signs of an NVA company reportedly passing through the area.
“Take down these grids,” the S-3 said, “and steer clear of them. Artillery will be laying down fire throughout the day. Okay, here are the other missions. . . . Swede and Connolly in Snakes, Farmer and Alexander in lift, Gerard and Bird Dog in the Loach—you’re a Purple Team. Here are your search coordinates. We understand there’s heavy bicycle traffic in the area and a possible weapons stash. Go find it. . . .”
Before I came to Tay Ninh, the screening teams were all Pink. Whenever a Loach was shot down, which happened frequently, it took up to thirty minutes to get a lift out there to snatch them out. Accompanying Cobras sometimes expended all their ammunition trying to keep the bad guys back. I had heard stories of Cobras recovering Loach crews by landing, jettisoning ammunition out of the little compartments in the Snakes’ bellies, and stuffing in airmen to lift them to safety. Somebody finally got smart and added Blue birds to the scouts and guns to make the team Purple. Fewer Loach crews were lost when a slick flew with the team ready to effect immediate deliverance.
“Activity is picking up,” said the squadron CO, Major Calhoun. “Be careful out there—but the general wants a body count for the Vulture Board.”
Everybody laughed. The body count was a joke. Most kills were estimates.
“Do you confirm five kills?” a pilot might ask a Blue ground platoon.
“Make that eight if you need the numbers,” the grunt would respond. “I can see three dead rock apes.”
“That’s close enough. I’ll confirm nine.”
The scout pilot’s mission hadn’t changed much since the days when General Custer was looking for Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. He could read a trail just as well as Kit Carson. He could tell if there had been use of a trail, when, how long ago, and by how many people, depending upon the condition of the ground and how close the trees allowed him to get to the trail—and all this while flying overhead. He was also looking for bunkers, rice and weapons caches, camps, and anything else that might provide information on the enemy, his movements, and his intentions.
The Loach, a “low bird,” flew slow clockwise circles just above the treetops, while the “high birds”—the Cobra and the slick—circled in lazy counterclockwise circles at about 1,500 and 3,000 feet respectively. The scout relayed all information to the Cobra. The Cobra X-Ray, the gunner, recorded it and passed it on as a “spot intel” report.
“Apache Two-Four, there’s been movement down here,” Gerard radioed from the Loach.
“Watch your ass, George,” Swede responded. “Can you tell how long ago?”
“It’s recent. At least since the last rain.”
Because the Loaches flew low and slow, they were sitting ducks for any dink hiding in a bush. They were particularly vulnerable to RPGs, rocket propelled grenades, the Russian equivalent of the bazooka. During “sniffer” missions I got a taste of what it was like being the low bird. Loach pilots had to have balls bigger than King Kong’s.
A “sniffer” was a high-tech approach to scouting. Two hoses were corked into a Huey’s drainage plugs and stretched back to a machine in the cargo bay operated by a couple of guys from special operations. Sensors were set to pick up odors from campfires and the ammonia in urine. We flew low above the jungle, skimming at dangerous treetop level over double and triple canopy while the machine sniffed. Another slick cruised at around 1,500 feet to guide the lower helicopter while a Cobra or two at our rear, also at treetop level, acted as guns. If we picked up anything, our job was to mark the target with smoke grenades and tracer bullets, then get the hell out of there. The Snakes followed the smoke grenades with miniguns and Willie Pete (white phosphorus) rockets.
A flight of slicks filled with Sky Troopers completed the arrangement. Their job was to land as near the action as possible, disgorge troops, and get a body count for Uncle Sam and the folks back home.
“We’re getting close to them,” the special ops guys would say over the intercom. “They’re coming up. They should be coming up now.”
If you were the enemy down inside the forest, you couldn’t tell by the sound of a low-flying helicopter where it was or which way it was heading. You never saw anything until it was directly overhead. The enemy always looked surprised. We came upon three VC, rifles slung over their shoulders, pedaling bicycles on a trail. The bicycles looked like they were loaded with a ton or two of rice, another ton of ammo, two mortars and a battle tank. I didn’t see how these scrawny little guys could even pedal them. When they saw us, they dropped their wheels and ducked off the trail into the woods. Shaky popped a smoke grenade on them. Then he and O’Brien the door gunner, one on each side, got in a few licks for God and country with their M60s while I pulled pitch and climbed out of the way.
Snakes dived on the fleeing VC, chasing them like ducks after June bugs. They shredded and burned and tore hell out of the terrain. I almost felt sorry for the poor little bastards down there.
But who I really felt sorry for were the victims of Arc Light missions. During TOC briefings, we were provided the flight path info for attacking B-52 bombers and assigned safe zones. The Guam-based B-52s flew so high you neither heard nor saw them. You didn’t see the bombs falling either. The first and only sign you received was that awful Second Coming of awesome power. Air waves seemed to crack and shimmy from the force. The earth shuddered all the way to Saigon. I knew many guys on ships out in the South China Sea who swore the ocean even rippled from the concussions.
It was at dawn that I witnessed my first one. I thought the sun was either coming up brighter than ever before, that the horizon had suddenly erupted in flames, or that Jesus was coming back. Apparently my AC, Mighty Morris, also observing his first, felt the same way.
“Jesus God!” he murmured in awe.
Helicopters swarmed to the site as soon as the smoke and dust cleared in order to conduct a BDA, a bomb damage assessment. The jungle looked like a moonscape pocked with monstrous craters. A desertlike stretch of fresh dunes and holes and mangled vegetation was all that remained of a VC tunnel complex. I flew low over it, stunned, while Shaky leaned out the cargo door and counted isolated arms and a leg here and there or a face, all of which we reported and which was multiplied or divided by some factor at higher-higher to get a body count. I thought nothing could survive a pounding like that.
But survive the enemy did. Shaken and mud-caked and his ears undoubtedly ringing, he scurried out of the ground like rats in a city dump to open fire, still full of fight. I had to hand it to the little commie men. They were either brainwashed into becoming a bunch of fanatical nuts—or they possessed gonads down to about their ankles.
Door gunners worked out on them. Snakes followed. Then the little men packed what remained of their ditty bags, shook off the dust, hauled ass to Cambodia and returned the next night to dig more tunnels.
You bombed them, rocketed them, shot them with everything short of a nuclear device, and they just kept coming back. I figured there must be about sixty billion of them hiding underneath each and every one of the sixty billion trees in Cambodia.
“Nuke ’em little cotton-picking cocksuckers till they glow in the dark,” Farmer Farmer suggested, “then use ’em for night targets.”
We were never going to run out of targets. Our jobs, it seemed, would never become obsolete. As of June 1968, the Vietnam War became the longest war ever fought by the United States. Hell, I knew guys who had been over here since about 1959 and were making a career of the war.
During one incredible night and day I logged fifteen hours in the cockpit in support of an operation. It began with flare duty. Flying at night with a low cloud ceiling and without being able to clearly see the horizon was a terrifying experience. We had these big parachute flares that the crew chief kicked out over an FSB in order to light up the attack area where NVA were probing. Your night vision was shot once the first flare popped. The mission after that became damned near suicidal.
Elongated shadows shifted and streamed before your eyes in a greenish, liquid world as the flares floated toward earth under their parachutes. The entire experience became a fantasy from the bowels of hell. Everything turned black and scary when the last flare sputtered out. It made me want to pray. Maybe I did.
After a couple of hours’ sleep, I was up again at Apache Sunrise and leapfrogging troops all over the AO, looking for the enemy. Grunts all helmeted and flak-jacketed and grim-faced piled into the cargo bay with their weapons. Three grunts would squeeze in on the canvas bench across the back of the cargo deck, three more onto the deck in front of them, while the remaining two filled up the two pockets. It was a load. Overloaded helicopters unable to hover could still fly if they made running takeoffs. Up on the collective and twist the throttle for maximum rpm. You had to keep it out of the red line, though, because otherwise you lost the tail rotor effect and the helicopter spun in the opposite direction. Up and out across the highway leading to Tay Ninh the city and over the river into Charlie country. We were mostly flying the newer, more powerful H-model Hueys; the old C and D models would never have made it.
Three or four Hueys loaded with troops echeloned off each other, each slightly behind, above and to the left of the one ahead. Snakes flew escort. Formation flying was tense. We flew so close you heard the buzzing of the tail rotor of the aircraft ahead. I lined up a point on my nose with the skid of the bird ahead. The two points moved slowly relative to each other as we surged through the air. We climbed at about ninety knots out past the Black Virgin, which in fact was no virgin. She was a whore raped so many times her entire womb was full of VC just waiting for the right time to spew forth like little demons from hell.
Apache Three-Four and Three-Six flew ahead of me, Apache Three-Five behind. I accelerated gently to maintain my position, overdid it, and backed off. Yo-yoing. The entire cavalcade began to bank in a turn toward me. I had to decelerate quickly to keep away, then accelerate to get back into position. Sort of like cracking the whip.
“Closer,” urged Captain Blue, ever the patient instructor as I worked toward becoming an AC myself.
“Closer?”
It looked like our rotors were overlapped already. I turned and looked out at Farmer Farmer and Miles in Three-Five off my left rear, guiding on me. Farmer waved.
Getting into LZs and out again in formation proved scary at first, especially when each LZ or PZ might be hot and had the potential of turning into an active volcano. Too steep an approach could stack up the birds and cause problems in setting down. An approach too shallow left you hanging out like a skeet target. Disguised voices over the radio expressed their displeasure with mistakes by calling the lead bird several forms of asshole.
There were basically two ways to get into an LZ. A tight, fast, spiraling descent, or a long, fast, low approach. Sometimes we popped into two or three LZs to confuse the enemy about which one actually received troops. Air assault, even on a cold LZ, was exhilarating when everything worked right. Low-level flying was the exciting part.
You only flew low when there were trees or riverbeds or other cover, never over open rice paddies or fields. The flight would drop down on a long approach to the LZ, the whole gaggle really moving from speed gained in the dive, flashing along above the jungle canopy at more than one hundred knots an hour. Burning coal, hauling ass.
My heart pounded in cadence with the muffled wop! wop! wop! of the main rotor. Blood rushing in my ears drowned out the roar and vibrations. All three radios chattering at the same time created further confusion.
Going in at speed, busting out over the clearing, quickly-decelerating for the landing. Back on the cycle and reduce collective to flare. Trying to see over the nose to get a glimpse of the LZ while Cobras dived and hammered in, prepping the surrounding treeline. All birds coming in and squatting simultaneously to reduce time on the ground and exposure to hostile fire. Both pilots in a ship with their hands on the controls in case one of them took a hit.
Grunts jumped out each door and bounded away toward the edge of the clearing. We waited ten seconds, then took off together, watching for the lead bird’s tail to move. Lifting when he did, staying tight so as not to straggle and delay the others.
We were in and out like that all day. Out with a load of troops, fly back in to Tay Ninh, jump out and take a piss during refueling, then either back out with more troops or pick up soldiers out there and drop them somewhere else. Other than that, I had no idea what the operation was nor what its strategy was. Snuffy was seldom provided a look at the Big Picture.
“Fuck this. Fuck this!” Mighty Morris exclaimed, beat from too many hours in the cockpit. “I ain’t taking it no more. I’m tired of all this chickenshit. I quit!”
But of course he couldn’t quit. None of us could. He was up again at Apache Sunrise. We all were.