Endless hours of patrolling. Back and forth across the AO snooping and pooping, interdicting the enemy by day or night and poking at him to keep him from organizing to attack Saigon. It was believed that if Saigon fell, so fell the country. Events all seemed to run together after a while. Scramble alarm shrilling in the middle of the night. Apache Sunrise. Downed pilots. Trapped pilots. LRRPs under fire. In and out of LZs and PZs so hot the Devil brought ice water. A Blue Max gun-ship went down and both pilots were killed. Headhunters came in after missions and walked around their ships counting bullet holes.
“How about Three-Seven?” they asked each other. “Any bullet holes in Mini-Man?”
Like a wiseass, I made a big show of not checking for bullet holes. As though I knew there wouldn’t be any, so why check. I took pride in being the little guy with a big set of balls. War was a game whose few and rudimentary rules I quickly mastered.
“Ol’ Crazy Horse thought the spirits would protect him from General Custer’s bullets,” Mighty Morris mused. “Mini-Man, you ain’t into the spirits, are you?”
“Crazy Horse finally got shot,” Farmer Farmer pointed out.
“Spirits or not,” Miles said with the old Headhunter spirit, “if we had been with General Custer’s cavalry at the Little Big Horn, that river would still be known for nothing except trout.”
“Don’t get cocky,” Captain Blue warned me. “There’s only one way to keep bullets away—and that’s a one-way airplane ticket home.”
Which was where Captain Beatty would be heading shortly, leaving the platoon in my command. Thinking about taking over made me nervous. I had never commanded men before. Was I capable?
By the end of April I was an aircraft commander. Another three months or less and I would be an aircraft commander and platoon leader for the Blue lifts. Captain Beatty informally donated to me his lanky Texas crew chief. Shaky knew his stuff, and he knew helicopters. I was most grateful. So was Shaky. He and I began flying most missions together, I in the cockpit’s left seat, he in the cargo bay with his machine gun and, on the ground, making sure my ship was always ready for takeoff.
“We’ve had six or eight downed helicopters and thirty or forty pilots, crew, or grunts killed in the AO in the last few months,” Shaky philosophized through his south Texas drawl, “but we haven’t had to patch a single bullet hole in any chopper you’ve flown, sir. Some guys can’t even fly to Vung Tau for beer resupply without getting shot.”
Whenever I thought deeply about it, which I tried not to do often for fear of changing my luck, I supposed I might have developed a different outlook on the war had I come over in artillery or infantry where I was actually down in there with the dinks and snakes. The war was different for each of us according to individual perspective.
Warplane crews in the fast movers and bombers took off from Da Nang or Ton Son Nhut or even Guam. They zipped in, dumped some bombs or rockets, then returned to base without experiencing the aftermath of their business. BDAs informed them they had destroyed so many enemy bunkers or inflicted damage on an NVA mortar platoon. They never saw the blood and smelled the guts and shit.
Although helicopter pilots were somewhat insulated from the full effects of the ground war, we were nonetheless much closer to the action than other aircraft jocks. We identified more with enlisted men and with grunts than we did with staff officers at MACV or other pilots. They were them, higher-higher, the brass, REMFs. We were us, the snuffies. Helicopters existed in that transition area between boonirats in the jungle and the rest of the war, fully a part of neither.
The helicopter made the war slightly more antiseptic for chopper jocks and crew. We had our moments of adrenaline and terror, of course, but they seldom lasted long. It was in and out, one round at a time. It was a lot of shooting and stuff, close enough to see and smell the corpses and blood and shit and snot and tears, but then we hauled ass and seldom had to experience the full aftermath. We could go back to the O Club for a cold beer and listen to Mighty Morris sing.
It was a crazy way to make a living. We all said so. Each of us had his own method of dealing with it. As I became a dues-paying member of the Headhunters’ fraternity of fighting brothers, I found myself in a peculiar sort of way beginning to enjoy the job. From my first elaborate attempts at avoiding Vietnam, I now went the other way and embraced the war with a forced nonchalance and a certain pride in being good at my job as well as an object of some admiration.
Sometimes I wondered what happened to that other little guy I had been before I morphed into Mini-Man, hero of the oppressed and champion of truth, justice, and the American Way. How different a war it might indeed have been had my inbound flight not been diverted and I ended up with my original orders at Vung Tau flying generals and T-bones and playing the angles. Or, even more different, had I come over in artillery and ended up in the jungle as an FO.
Rather than writing letters home, I called Sandy regularly over a radio-telephone line through Japan. You could do that if you were stationed at a larger post. In one of my rare letters to her, however, I tried to explain things.
“I’ve changed since I’ve been in Vietnam,” I wrote. “For the better, I think. Flying seems to be the thing I’m most suited for, that I was born to do. I feel like I’m doing an important job here. That’s it’s important to me, to you, to our children, and to our country. I really believe defeating communism will help keep the United States free, if the politicians and lawyers don’t take away freedom first. I have to do everything I can to do my part. . . . ”