Mighty Morris ragged Farmer Farmer about having fallen off his Alabama turnip wagon too many times. It wasn’t that Warrant Officer Farmer suffered from spatial or perspective problems; he was merely clumsy. During the continuing volleyball game, he spiked the ball against the net and back into his own face. The scramble alarm sounded and he jumped up, made a break for the door, and crashed into the door frame. I wondered how he survived flight school. If he had had Captain Nice, he surely wouldn’t have made it.
The fact was that at times he was absolutely brilliant at the controls of a helicopter. He did things with a chopper that machines weren’t supposed to do. But then he suddenly had an attention span lapse and did something stupid. You never knew which of the two Farmer Farmers you were flying with. I kept a wary eye on him whenever we flew together. He was okay at safe altitudes, but I contrived to take the sticks myself whenever we dropped down on the contours to snoop and poop, sneak and peek.
Shaky was as jittery about him as I was. He took me aside when Farmer volunteered to fly right seat with us on a sniffer mission. He looked worried.
“Sir, you ain’t letting Mr. Farmer fly down low, are you?”
“Don’t worry,” I reassured him. “I don’t feel that charmed.”
Every pilot enjoyed flying low level, skimming the air on that cushion right above the treetops. There was a “dead man’s zone” that covered the area between about 100 feet above the ground up to 1,000-foot altitude. Above 1,000 feet, you were out of effective reach of most ground fire. Below 100 feet, the bad guys couldn’t see you until you flew directly overhead. Strange in that the lower you were or the higher you were, the safer you were.
“I feel as sharp as a hen’s tooth today,” Farmer Farmer affirmed in his slow southern vernacular.
“I’ll fly,” I said quickly.
Shaky let out a breath of relief. The sniffer team was already aboard with its bloodhound machine. Farmer, Shaky, and I climbed into our places. I took off and flew out toward the Saigon Corridor where George Gerard flying his Loach had located a VC bicycle factory a few weeks before. There had been a big firefight followed by an Arc Light B-52 attack that left a huge scorched gash across the jungle.
If there were hills, you tried to stay close to them for protection when you flew low. Since there were no hills in our AO except the Black Virgin, I grazed just above triple canopy jungle. Shaky braced himself spread-legged in the door with his umbilical monkey line secured and his M60 ready to rock ‘n’ roll.
“Okay, I got a scent,” one of the sniffer guys said through the intercom.
“Did you read that, Shaky?” I asked.
“I’m ready for ’em, Mini-Man.”
“We should be coming up on them,” Sniffer said, getting excited.
Occasionally I glimpsed sections of a pathway down through the tree canopy. Hunting men was exciting. Anyone who claimed differently was not being honest.
Shaky spotted movement the same instant I did. Some guy hauling ass on a motorbike. I paced the guy, peering down through my chin bubble and watching him flicker in and out of view. Shaky got a clear sight picture and opened up with his M60. Leaves and limbs exploded as the machine gun fire cut into the foliage.
“He’s down!” Shaky exclaimed.
I didn’t see him go down, but I didn’t see him riding anymore either.
“Down for good?” I asked.
“He’s down. Sir, come back around. There! Do you see him?”
Although we were generally credited with several kills a day when our boonirats were in contact with the enemy, I knew for a fact that the Vulture Board received many kills that were only estimates. There was no doubt about this guy, though. He was dead, ripped all apart and lying in a thick pool of his own blood mixed with spilled gasoline from the bullet-riddled motorbike.
“Do we count that as a confirmed, sir?” Shaky asked.
“His hide is on the Vulture board,” Farmer declared.
I lifted the chopper away. One dead enemy was a good day’s work. You lost interest after that. We were all ready to declare victory and go home. The sniffers wanted to continue work on the way back, make a token effort anyhow. I stayed low and headed over the green sweep of jungle toward Nui Ba Den rising like a giant tit to our left front.
“I got it?” Farmer Farmer asked.
I looked at him. I saw a brace of Cobras from out his window working out on something a mile or so away. Rockets shot from their stubby wings like slivers of fire. “Okay,” I said, relinquishing the controls. “You got it. Ease off to the south away from them Cobras, will you? It’s not our fight.”
He continued flying a few feet above the top of the jungle for the benefit of the sniffers. I relaxed, hands folded in my lap, and watched the forest slide rapidly past below us. An unbroken carpet of the deepest green, almost iridescent under the tropical sun. I expected nothing between here and Tay Ninh. I realized I was hungry.
“Hunting gooks all day makes me famished,” Mighty Morris once put it. “And when I’m famished, nothing satisfies my appetite like a big bowl of hog entrails and beef tripe from an army dining facility.”
I glanced ahead and saw a dead treetop sticking up above the green. It was a gray and twisted snag about five hundred meters ahead. We were heading directly for it at about eighty knots an hour. I didn’t think anything about it. I figured Farmer would pop the collective and hop over it the way we always did.
The next time I glanced up, the snag loomed about 100 meters directly ahead. Farmer was looking squarely at it. He seemed relaxed and aware. Although I was sure he knew what he was doing, I still felt the muscles in my legs tense.
I watched mesmerized as we approached.
I started to cry out at the last moment. “Farmer—!”
Too late. That hillbilly didn’t hop and pop at all. We busted right through the dead treetop in an explosion of gray wood. The chin bubble at my feet splintered with a crack like a rifle. The chopper shuttered dangerously to one side, dumping the two sniffer guys on top of each other and throwing Shaky lunging against his monkey line. It was the only thing that saved him from sailing out the door.
“Taking fire?” Shaky yelled through the intercom, surprised.
“Taking a tree!” I corrected, fuming with astonishment and indignation.
Farmer had to have seen the damn tree. His visor concealed his face, but his body language betrayed him. He was as astonished as the rest of us. I waited until he got the Huey straightened out again before I reclaimed the controls. I quickly checked the instrument panel to make sure no red lights were on.
“Did you see the tree?” I asked once I had myself under control along with the helicopter.
He allowed he had.
“Why did you hit it then?”
“I don’t rightly know.”
That was the only explanation he ever gave. I reported the incident to Captain Blue. Blue talked to him and let it go. No real harm done. He was just careless. Besides, we were always short on pilots.
I ordered him, not the crew chief, to replace the chin bubble. I figured his putting in 180 screws that held the Plexiglas in place might give him time to contemplate his error. He looked puzzled and a little dumbfounded.
“I oughta have you put a piece of the Plexiglas in your navel so you can see when you got your head stuck up your ass,” I scolded.
“It was an idiot thing to do,” he admitted.
I agreed with him.