A twin-rotored Chinook flew out from Phuoc Vinh, hooked sling lines to the disabled chopper and pulled it out for repairs and salvage. By that time, I had dropped the bruised soldier off for first aid, refueled, and met Captain Ring Knocker and the others at LZ Barber. We returned to pick up the security platoon at the clearing, where we found soldiers relaxing, smoking and joking in the trees around the PZ. The sniper had apparently di-di’d after firing his one shot.
Again, I went in as Chalk One with Williams and Farmer as Chalk Two. It was a routine extraction until we lifted off with the troops. I had noticed while on the ground that Captain Williams was flying the helicopter from the right seat. Nothing wrong with that. It was just that most guys preferred the left because of the better view down through the chin bubble. In flight school, IPs always flew left while students took the right. Williams obviously felt more comfortable in the student position.
I elevatored out of the PZ and was well on my way to altitude when Williams behind me broke to the right, which was a natural thing to do for a pilot flying from that side of the ship. Instead of gathering steam and altitude immediately, popping out of there, he mushed along at an altitude of about a thousand feet at a slow sixty knots. Slow and low, a matter of inexperience. A .51-caliber antiaircraft gun had an effective range of well over a thousand meters. Williams at three hundred meters high was dead in the center of a kill zone.
He passed directly over a .51 pit. Something was going on down there, a small base camp maybe, or a platoon patrol. Blue infantry hadn’t located it while securing the crash site and the PZ.
The first round smashed through Williams’s left chin bubble.
Startled, Williams immediately pulled to the left, which turned him directly into the antiaircraft fire instead of away from it. Shaky happened to be looking back from the bay door of my lead ship when what looked like a solid stream of green tethered the second Huey to the ground. Tracers smoked and chewed at the chopper, batting it about in the sky. It shuddered and began rolling to the left and right while its nose pitched up and down. It seemed to be disintegrating before Shaky’s eyes. It took thirty-six hits in less than three seconds.
“We’re hit! We’re hit real bad!” Williams yelled into his mike, a statement immediately followed by a horrific scream of agony.
Armor-piercing rounds nearly ate off the nose of the wounded helicopter. One struck Williams’s right leg. It splintered the bone from shin to above the knee and made hamburger of his leg. The point of the round stuck out through the skin of his right thigh, having been prevented from going all the way through by his seat armor. Blood exploded inside the cockpit.
Worse yet, Williams’s leg and foot got wedged in the pedals, making them inoperable. The aircraft went crazy all over the sky, like a balloon spurting out air. Farmer Farmer fought with the controls. He completely freaked out. He was screaming his head off.
“We’re taking hits! I can’t control it! We’re going down. . .down!. . .”
Fortunately, his crew chief, Palma, trained by Shaky, was fast becoming one of the best and coolest crewmen in the platoon. He kept his head. Each pilot’s seat had two little red handles with safety wires, one on each side. The handles released the seat and let the back fold down. Palma lunged over the top of the panicked troops in the bay, jerked the red handles and dragged Williams howling with pain into the back. That freed the pedals, allowing Farmer to regain control of the bird before it blasted into the jungle.
Miraculously, the Huey remained airworthy.
“Farmer, are you okay?” I shouted at him through the radio.
Once out of the kill zone, Farmer’s composure returned. “I’m okay. Just scared. Oh, God. I really think I got the calf scours and messed my pants.”
In the meantime, the third ship in line took eighteen hits but continued to fly. Mighty Morris at tail end instantly jiggered to the left and poured on the coal, escaping without damage. Snakes rolled in hot on the .51s while my forlorn little squadron limped back to base. Two of my ships were shot all to hell, having accumulated fifty-four bullet holes between them. It was unbelievable that they could still fly. Even more unbelievable, considering that both birds were stuffed with crew and troops, the only man wounded was Captain Williams. Which proved that helicopters were harder to bring down than some people supposed and that guys were pretty hard to kill, all in all.
My helicopter hadn’t been fired upon.
None of us ever saw Captain Ring Knocker again after that. His replacement, a captain named Powdrill, was a muscular young redheaded guy who arrived with enough good common sense to realize he didn’t know it all. He soon replaced Major Calhoun as Troop commander and became a good leader.